
Class 
Book. 



I C) 



^-^^/'•^ 



6 ?- 

(gugUsI) ittcit of Ctttcra 

EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY 



WOEDS WORTH 



BY 



F. W. II. MYEES 



^From worlds not quickened by the sun 

A portion of the gift is ivon 

An intermingling of Heaven''s pomp is spread 

On ground tvhich British shepherds tread'''' 





NEW YORK 

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS 

FRANKLIN SQUARE 

1881 



7^ 



CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER I. PAGE 

Birth and Education.— Cambridge 1 

CHAPTER II. 
Residence in London and in France 15 

CHAPTER III. 
Miss Wordsworth.— Lyrical Ballads.— Settlement 

AT GRASMERE . "^"^ 

CHAPTER IV. 

The English Lakes '^^ 

CHAPTER V. 
Marriage.— Society.— Highland Tour 55 

CHAPTER VI. 
Sir George Beaumont.— Death of John Wordsworth 65 

CHAPTER VII. 
" Happy Warrior/' and Patriotic Poems ..... 74 



vi CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER VIII. 
Children. — Life at Rydal Mount. — " The Excursion" 84 



CHAPTER IX. 
Poetic Diction.— "Laodamia." — "Evening Ode" . . 103 

CHAPTER X. 
Natural Religion 123 

CHAPTER XI. 
Italian Tour. — Ecclesiastical Sonnets.— Political 
Views. — Laureateship 153 

CHAPTER XII. 
Letters on The Kendal and Windermere Railway. 
— Conclusion 1(J7 



WORDSWORTH. 

CHAPTER I 

BIRTH AND EDUCATION. CAMBRIDGE. 

I CANNOT, perhaps, more fitly begin tliis sliort biography 
than with some words in which its subject has expressed 
his own feehngs as to the spirit in wliich such a task 
should be approached. *' Silence," says Wordsworth, *' is 
a privilege of the grave, a right of the departed : let him, 
therefore, who infringes that right by speaking publicly 
of, for, or against those who cannot speak for themselves, 
take heed that he opens not his mouth without a suffi- 
cient sanction. Only to philosophy enlightened by the af- 
fections does it belong justly to estimate the claims of the 
deceased, on the one hand, and of the present age and fut- 
ure generations, on the other, and to strike a balance be- 
tween them. Such philosophy runs a risk of becoming- 
extinct among us, if the coarse intrusions into the recesses, 
the gross breaches upon the sanctities, of domestic life, to 
which we have lately been more and more accustomed, are 
to be regarded as indications of a vigorous state of public 
feeling. The wise and good respect, as one of the noblest 
characteristics of Englishmen, that jealousy of familiar ap- 



2 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

proach Avliicli, ^vllile it contributes to the maintenance of 
private dignity, is one of tlie most eflicacious guardians of 
rational public freedom." 

In accordance with these views the poet entrusted to 
his nephew, the present Bishop of Lincoln, the task of 
composing memoirs of his life, in the just confidence that 
nothing would by such hands be given to the world which 
was inconsistent with the dignity either of the living or 
of the dead. From those memoirs the facts contained in 
the present work have been for the most part drawn. It 
has, however, been my fortune, through hereditary friend- 
ships, to have access to many manuscript letters and much 
oral tradition bearing upon the poet's private life;^ and 
some details and some passages of letters hitherto unpub- 
lished will appear in these pages. It would seem, how- 
ever, that there is but little of public interest in AVords- 
worth's life which has not already been given to the world, 
and I have shrunk from narrating such minor personal in- 
cidents as he would himself have thought it needless to 
dwell upon. I have endeavoured, in short, to write as 
though the Subject of this biography were himself its 
Auditor, listening, indeed, from some region where all of 
truth is discerned and nothing but truth desired, but check- 
ing by his venerable presence any such revelation as pub- 
lic advantage does not call for, and private delicacy would 
condemn. 

As regards the critical remarks which these pages con- 
tain, I have only to say that I have carefully consulted 
such notices of the poet as his personal friends have left 

^ I take this opportunity of thanking Mr. William Wordsworth, 
the son, and Mr. William Wordsworth, the grandson, of the poet, for 
help most valuable in enabling mc to give a true impression of the 
poet's personality. 



I.] BIRTH AND EDUCATION. 3 

us, and also, I believe, nearly every criticism of importance 
which has appeared on his works. I find with pleasure 
that a considerable agreement of opinion exists — though 
less among professed poets or critics than among men of 
eminence in other departments of thought or action whose 
attention has been directed to Wordsworth's poems. And 
although I have felt it right to express in each case my 
own views with exactness, I have been able to feel that I 
am not obtruding on the reader any merely fanciful esti- 
mate in which better accredited judges would refuse to 
concur. 

Without further preface I now begin my story of 
Wordsworth's life, in words which he himself dictated to 
his intended biographer. "I was born," he said, "at 
Cockermouth, in Cumberland, on April 7th, 1V70, the sec- 
ond son of John Wordsworth, attorney-at-law — as lawyers 
of this class were then called — and law-agent to Sir James 
Lowther, afterwards Earl of Lonsdale. My mother was 
Anne, only daughter of William Cookson, mercer, of Pen- 
rith, and of Dorothy, born Crackanthorp, of the ancient 
family of that name, who from the times of Edward the 
Third had lived in Newbiggen Hall, Westmoreland. My 
grandfather was the first of the name of Wordsworth who 
came into Westmoreland, where he purchased the small 
estate of Sockbridge. He was descended from a family 
who had been settled at Peniston, in Yorkshire, near the 
sources of the Don, probably before the Norman Conquest. 
Their names appear on different occasions in all the trans- 
actions, personal and public, connected with that parish ; 
and I possess, through the kindness of Colonel Beaumont, 
an almery, made in 1525, at the expense of a AVilliam 
Wordsworth, as is expressed in a Latin inscription carved 
upon it, which carries the pedigree of the family back four 
1* 



4 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

generations from himself. The time of my infancy and 
early boyhood was passed partly at Cockermouth, and 
partly with my mother's parents at Penrith, where my 
mother, in the year 1778, died of a decline, brought on by 
a cold, in consequence of being put, at a friend's house in 
London, in what used to be called ' a best bedroom.' My 
father never recovered his usual cheerfulness of mind af- 
ter this loss, and died when I was in my fourteenth year, 
a school-boy, just returned from Hawkshead, whither I had 
been sent with my elder brother Richard, in my ninth year. 
" I remember my mother only in some few situations, 
one of which was her pinning a nosegay to my breast, 
when I was going to say the catechism in the church, as 
was customary before Easter. An intimate friend of hers 
told me that she once said to her that the only one of her 
five children about whose future life she was anxious was 
William ; and he, she said, would be remarkable, either 
for good or for evil. The cause of this was that I was of 
a stiff, moody, and violent temper; so much so that I 
remember going once into the attics of my grandfather's 
house at Penrith, upon some indignity having been put 
upon me, with an intention of destroying myself with one 
of the foils which I knew was kept there. I took the foil 
in hand, but my heart failed. Upon another occasion, 
while I was at my grandfather's house at Penrith, along 
with my eldest brother, Richard, we were whipping tops 
together in the large drawing-room, on which the carpet 
was only laid down upon particular occasions. The walls 
■ were hung round with family pictures, and I said to my 
brother, 'Dare you strike your whip through that old 
lady's petticoat ?' He replied, ' No, I won't.' ' Then,' said 
I, ' here goes !' and I struck my lash through her hooped 
petticoat ; for which, no doubt, though I have forgotten 



I.] BIRTH AND EDUCATIOX. 5 

it, I was properly punished. But, possibly from some 
want of judg-ment in punishments inflicted, I had become 
perverse and obstinate in defying chastisement, and rather 
proud of it than otherwise. 

" Of my earliest days at school I have little to say, but 
that they were very happy ones, chiefly because I was left 
at liberty then, and in the vacations, to read whatever 
books I liked. For example, I read all Fielding's works, 
Don Quixote, Gil Bias, and any part of Swift that I liked 
— Gulliver's Travels, and the Tale of a Tab, being both 
much to my taste. It may be, perhaps, as well to mention 
that the first verses which I wrote were a task imposed by 
my master — the subject. The Summer Vacation; and of 
ray own accord I added others upon Return to School. 
There was nothing remarkable in either poem ; but I was 
called upon, among other scholars, to write verses upon 
the completion of the second centenary from the founda- 
tion of the school in 1585 by Archbishop Sandys. These 
verses were much admired — far more than they deserved, 
for they were but a tame imitation of Pope's versification, 
and a little in his style." 

But it was not from exercises of this kind that Words- 
worth's school-days drew their inspiration. No years of 
his life, perhaps, were richer in strong impressions ; but 
they were impressions derived neither from books nor 
from companions, but from the majesty and loveliness of 
the scenes around him; — from Nature, his life-long mis- 
tress, loved with the first heats of youth. To her influence 
we shall again recur; it will be most convenient first to 
trace Wordsworth's progress through the curriculum of 
ordinary education. 

It was due to the liberality of Wordsworth's two uncles, 
Richard Wordsworth and Christopher Crackanthorp (un- 



WORDS\vORTH. [chap. 

-1-1 uliooo cctre lie and his brothers were placed at their 
father's death, in 1783), that his education was prolonged 
beyond his school-days. For Sir James Lowther, after- 
wards Lord Lonsdale — whose agent Wordsworth's father, 
Mr. John Wordsworth, was — becomino; aware that his aixent 
had about 5000^. at the bank, and wishing, partly on polit- 
ical grounds, to make his power over him absolute, had 
forcibly borrowed this sum of him, and then refused to 
repay it. After Mr. John Wordsworth's death much of 
the remaining fortune which he left behind him was wasted 
in efforts to compel Lord Lonsdale to refund this sum ; 
but it was never recovered till his death in 1801, when his 
successor repaid 8500/. to the AVordsworths, being a full 
acquittal, with interest, of the original debt. The fortunes 
of the Wordsworth family were, therefore, at a low ebb in 
1787, and much credit is due to the uncles who discerned 
the talents of William ^nd Christopher, and bestowed a 
Cambridge education on the future Poet Laureate, and the 
future Master of Trinity. 

In October, 1787, then, Wordsworth went up as an un- 
dergraduate to St. John's College, Cambridge. The first 
court of this College, in the south-western corner of which 
were Wordsworth's rooms, is divided only by a narrow 
lane from the Chapel of Trinity College, and his first 
memories are of the Trinity clock, telling the hours "twice 
over, with a male and female voice," of the pealing organ, 
and of the prospect when 

" From my pillow looking forth, by light 
Of moon or favouring stars I could behold 
The antechapel, where the statue stood 
Of Newton with his prism and silent face, 
The marble index of a mind for ever 
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone." 



I.] CAMBRIDGE. 7 

For the most part, the recollections wliicli AVordswortli 
brought away from Cambridge are such as had already- 
found expression more than once in English literature ; 
for it has been the fortune of that ancient University to 
receive in her bosom most of that long line of poets who 
form the peculiar glory of our English speech. Spenser, 
Ben Jonson, and Marlowe ; Dryden, Cowley, and Waller ; 
Milton, George Herbert, and Gray — to mention only the 
most familiar names — had owed allegiance to that mother 
who received Wordsworth now, and Coleridge and Byron 
immediately after him. "Not obvious, not obtrusive, 
she ;" but yet her sober dignity has often seemed no un- 
worthy setting for minds, like Wordsworth's, meditative 
without languor, and energies advancing without shock or 
storm. Never, perhaps, has the spirit of Cambridge been 
more truly caught than in Milton's Penseroso ; for this 
poem obviously reflects the seat of learning which the 
poet had lately left, just as the Allegro depicts the cheer- 
ful rusticity of the Buckinghamshire village which was his 
new home. And thus the Penseroso was understood by 
Gray, who, in his Installation Ode, introduces Milton 
among the bards and sages who lean from heaven, 

" To bless the place where, on their opening soul, 
First the genuine ardour stole." 

" 'Twas Milton struck the deep-toned shell," and invoked 
with the old affection the scenes which witnessed his best 
and early years : 

" Ye brown o'er-arching groves, 
That contemplation loves, 
Where willowy Camus lingers with delight ! 
Oft at the blush of dawn 
I trod your level lawn, 
Oft wooed the gleam of Cynthia silver-bright 



WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

In cloisters dim, far from the haunts of Folly, 

With Freedom by my side, and soft-eyed Melancholy." 



And Wordsworth also "on the dry smooth- shaven green" 
paced on solitary evenings " to the far-off curfew's sound," 
beneath those groves of forest-trees among which " Philo- 
mel still deigns a song " and the spirit of contemplation 
lingers still ; whether the silent avenues stand in the sum- 
mer twilight filled with fragrance of the lime, or the long- 
rows of chestnut engirdle the autumn river- lawns with 
w^alls of golden glow, or the tall elms cluster in garden or 
Wilderness into towering citadels of green. Beneath one 
exquisite ash-tree, wreathed with ivy, and hung in autumn 
with yellow tassels from every spray,Wordsworth used to 
linger long. " Scarcely Spenser's self," he tells us, 

" Could have more tranquil visions in his youth, 
Or could more bright appearances create 
Of human forms with superhuman powers, 
Than I beheld loitering on calm, clear nights 
Alone, beneath this fairv work of earth." 

And there was another element in AVordsworth's life at 
Cambridge more peculiarly his own — that exultation which 
a boy born among the mountains may feel when he per- 
ceives that the delight in the external world which the 
mountains have taught him has not perished by uprooting, 
nor waned for want of nourishment in field or fen ; that 
even here, where nature is unadorned, and scenery, as it 
were, reduced to its elements — where the prospect is but 
the plain surface of the earth, stretched wide beneath an 
open heaven — even here he can still feel the early glow, 
can take delight in that broad and tranquil greenness, and 
in the august procession of the day. 



I.] CAMBRIDGE. 9 

" As if awakened, summoned, roused, constrained, 
I loolced for universal tilings ; perused 
The common countenance of earth and sky — 
Earth, nowhere unembellished by some trace 
Of that first Paradise whence man was driven ; 
And sky, whose beauty and bounty are expressed 
By the proud name she bears — the name of Heaven." 

Nor is it only in these open air scenes that Wordsworth 
has added to the long tradition a memory of his own. 
The " storied windows richly dight," which have passed 
into a proverb in Milton's song, cast in King's College 
Chapel the same " soft chequerings " upon their frame- 
work of stone while Wordsworth watched through the 
pauses of the anthem the winter afternoon's departing glow : 

" Martyr, or King, or sainted Eremite, 
Whoe'er ye be that thus, yourselves unseen. 
Imbue your prison-bars with solemn sheen, 
Shine on until ye fade with coming Night." 

From those shadowy seats whence Milton had heard " the 
pealing organ blow to the full-voiced choir below," Words- 
worth too gazed upon — 

" That branching roof 
Self-poised, and scooped into ten thousand cells 
Where light and shade repose, where music dwells 
Lingering, and wandering on as loth to die — 
Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof 
That they were born for immortality." 

Thus much, and more, there was of ennobling and un- 
changeable in the very aspect and structure of that ancient 
University, by which Wordsworth's mind was bent towards 
a kindred greatness. But of active moral and intellectual 
life there was at that time little to be found within her 



10 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

walls. The floodtide of her new life had not yet set in; 
she was still slumbering-, as she had slumbered long, con- 
tent to add to her majesty by the mere lapse of genera- 
tions, and increment of her ancestral calm. Even had the 
intellectual life of the place been more stirring, it is doubt- 
ful how far Wordsworth would have been welcomed, or 
deserved to be welcomed, by authorities or students. He 
began residence at seventeen, and his northern nature was 
late to flower. There seems, in fact, to have been even 
less of visible promise about him than we should have ex- 
pected ; but rather something untamed and insubordinate, 
something heady and self-confident ; an independence that 
seemed only rusticity, and an indolent ignorance which as- 
sumed too readily the tones of scorn. He was as yet a 
creature of the lakes and mountains, and love for Nature 
was only slowly leading him to love and reverence for man. 
Nay, such attraction as he had hitherto felt for the human 
race had been interwoven with her influence in a way so 
strange that to many minds it will seem a childish fancy 
not worth recounting. The objects of his boyish ideali- 
zation had been Cumbrian shepherds — a race whose per- 
sonality seems to melt into Nature's — who are united as 
intimately with moor and mountain as the petrel with the 

sea. 

" A rambling school-boy, thus 

I felt his presence in his own domain 

As of a lord and master — or a power, 

Or genius, under Nature, under God, 

Presiding ; and severest solitude 

Had more commanding looks when he was there. 

When up the lonely brooks on rainy days 

Angling I went, or trod the trackless hills 

By mists bewildered, suddenly mine eyes 

Have glanced upon him distant a few steps. 

In size a giant, stalking through thick fog. 



I.] CAMBKIDGE. 11 

Ilis sheep like Greenland bears ; or, as he stepped 

Beyond the boundary line of some hill-shadow, 

His form hath flashed upon rae, glorified 

By the deep radiance of the setting sun ; 

Or him have I descried in distant sky, 

A solitary object and sublime, 

Above all height ! like an aerial cross 

Stationed alone upon a spiry rock 

Of the Chartreuse, for worship. Thus was man 

Ennobled outwardly before my sight ; 

And thus my heart was early introduced 

To an unconscious love and reverence 

Of human nature ; hence the human form 

To me became an index of delight. 

Of grace and honour, power and worthiness." 

" This sanctity of Nature given to man " — this interfu- 
sion of human interest with the sublimity of moor and 
hill — formed a typical introduction to the manner in 
which "Wordsworth regarded mankind to the end — de- 
picting him as set, as it were, amid impersonal influences, 
which make his passion and struggle but a little thing ; as 
when painters give but a strip of their canvas to the fields 
and cities of men, and overhang the narrowed landscape 
with the space and serenity of heaven. 

To this distant perception of man — of man "purified, 
removed, and to a distance that was fit " — was added, in 
his first summer vacation, a somewhat closer interest in the 
small joys and sorrows of the villagers of Hawkshead — a 
new sympathy for the old Dame in whose house the poet 
sHil lodged, for " the quiet woodman in the woods," and 
even for the " frank-hearted maids of rocky Cumberland," 
with whom he now delighted to spend an occasional even- 
ing in dancing and country mirth. And since the events 
in this poet's life are for the most part inward and unseen. 



12 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

and depend upon some shock and coincidence between the 
operations of his spirit and the cosmorama of the external 
world, he has recorded with especial emphasis a certain 
sunrise which met him as he walked homewards from one 
of these scenes of rustic gaiety — a sunrise which may be 
said to have begun that poetic career which a sunset was 
to close : 

" Ah ! need I say, dear Friend, that to the brim 
My heart was full ; I made no vows, but vows 
Were then made for me ; bond unknown to mc 
Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly, 
A dedicated Spirit." 

His second long vacation brought him a further gain in 
human affections. His sister, of whom he had seen little 
for some years, was with him once more at Penrith, and 
with her another maiden, 

" By her exulting outside look of youth 
And placid under-countenance, first endeared ;" 

whose presence now laid the foundation of a love which 
was to be renewed and perfected when his need for it was 
full, and was to be his support and solace to his life's end. 
His third long vacation he spent in a walking tour in 
Switzerland. Of this, now the commonest relaxation of 
studious youth, he speaks as of an " unprecedented course," 
indicating '' a hardy slight of college studies and their set 
rewards." And it seems, indeed, probable that Words- 
worth and his friend Jones were actually the first under- 
graduates who ever spent their summer in this way. The 
pages of the Prelude which narrate this excursion, and 
especially the description of the crossing of the Sim- 
plon — 



i.J CAMBRIDGE. 13 

*' The immeasurable lieiglit 
Of woods decaying, never to be decayed " — 

form one of the most impressive parts of tliat singular au- 
tobiograpliical poem, which, at first sight so tedious and 
insipid, seems to gather force and meaning with each fresh 
perusal. These pages, which carry up to the verge of 
manhood the story of Wordsworth's career, contain, per- 
haps, as strong and simple a picture as we shall anywhere 
find of hardy English youth — its proud self-sufficingness 
and careless independence of all human things. Excite- 
ment, and thought, and joy, seem to come at once at its 
bidding; and the chequered and struggling existence of 
adult men seems something which it need never enter, and 
hardly deigns to comprehend. 

Wordsworth and his friend encountered on this tour 
many a stirring symbol of the expectancy that was run- 
ning through the nations of Europe. They landed at 
Calais " on the very eve of that great federal day " when 
the Trees of Liberty were planted all over France. They 
met on their return 

" The Brabant armies on the fret 
For battle in the cause of liberty." 

But the exulting pulse that ran through the poet's veins 
could hardly yet pause to sympathize deeply even- with 
what in the world's life appealed most directly to ardent 
youth. 

"A stripling, scarcely of the household then 
Of social life, I looked upon these things 
As from a distance ; heard, and saw, and felt — 
Was touched, but with no intimate concern. 
I seemed to move along them as a bird 
Moves through the air, or as a fish pursues 
Its sport or feeds in its proper element. 



U WORDSWORTH. [chap. i. 

I wanted not that joy, I did not need 

Such help. The ever-Hviug universe, 

Turn where I might, was opening out its glories ; 

And the independent spirit of pure youth 

Called forth at every season new delights. 

Spread round my steps like sunshine o'er green fields." 



CHAPTER II. 

RESIDENCE IN LONDON AND IN FRANCE. 

Wordsworth took his B.A. degree in January, 1791, and 
quitted Cambridge with no fixed intentions as to his fut- 
ure career. " He did not feel himself," he said long af- 
terwards, " good enough for the Church ; he felt that his 
mind was not properly disciplined for that holy office, and 
that the struggle between his conscience and his impulses 
would have made life a torture. He also shrank from the 
law. He had studied military history with great interest, 
and the strategy of war ; and he always fancied that he 
had talents for command ; and he at one time thought of 
a military life ; but then he Avas without connexions, and 
he felt if he were ordered to the West Indies his talents 
would not save him from the yellow fever, and he gave 
that up." He therefore repaired to London, and lived 
there for a time on a small allowance, and with no definite 
aim. His relations with the great city were of a very 
slight and external kind. He had few acquaintances, and 
spent his time mainly in rambling about the streets. His 
descriptions of this phase of his life have little interest. 
There is some flatness in an enumeration of the nationali- 
ties observable in a London crowd, concluding thus — 

" Malays, Lascars, the Tartar, the Chiuese, 
And Negro Ladies in white muslin gowns." 



16 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

But Wordswortli's limitations were inseparably con- 
nected with his strength. And just as the flat scenery of 
Cambridgeshire had only served to intensify his love for 
such elements of beauty and grandeur as still were pres- 
ent in sky and fen, even so the bewilderment of London 
taught him to recognize with an intenser joy such frag- 
ments of things rustic, such aspects of things eternal, as 
were to be found amidst that rush and roar. To the frail- 
er spirit of Hartley Coleridge the weight of London might 
seem a load impossible to shake off. "And what hath 
Nature," he plaintively asked — • 

" And what hath Nature but the blank void sky 
And the thronged river toihng to the main ?" 

But Wordsworth saw more than this. He became, as one 
may say, the poet not of London considered as London, 
but of London considered as a part of the country. Like 
his own Farmer of Tilshury Vale — 

" In the throng of the Town like a Stranger is he, 
Like one whose own Country's far over the sea ; 
And Nature, while through the great city he hies, 
Full ten times a day takes his heart by surprise." 

Among the poems describing these sudden shocks of 
vision -and memory none is more exquisite than the Rev- 
erie of Poor Susan : 

" iVt the corner of Wood Street, when dayhght appears, 
Hangs a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years : 
Poor Susan has passed by the spot, and has heard 
In the silence of morning the song of the Bird. 

" 'Tis a note of enchantment ; what ails her ? She sees 
A mountain ascending, a vision of trees ; 
Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide. 
And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside." 



il] residence in LONDON AND IN FRANCE. lY 

The picture is one of those which come home to many a 
comitiy heart with one of those sudden " revulsions into 
the natural" which philosophers assert to be the essence 
of human joy. But noblest and best known of all these 
poems is the Sonnet on Westminster Bridge, " Earth hath 
not anything to show more fair ;" in which Nature has re- 
asserted her dominion over the works of all the multitude 
of men ; and in the early clearness the poet beholds the 
great City — as Sterling imagined it on his dying bed — 
" not as full of noise and dust and confusion, but as some- 
thing silent, grand, and everlasting." And even in later 
life, when Wordsworth was often in London, and was wel- 
come in any society, he never lost this external manner 
of regarding it. lie was always of the same mind as the 
group of listeners in his Power of Music : 

" Now, Coaches and Chariots ! roar on like a stream ! 
Here are twenty Souls happy as souls in a dream : 
They are deaf to your murmurs, they care not for you, 
Nor what ye are flying, nor what ye pursue !" 

He never made the attempt — vulgarized by so many a 
" fashionable novelist," and in which no poet has succeeded 
yet — to disentangle from that turmoil its elements of ro- 
mance and of greatness ; to enter that realm of emotion 
where Nature's aspects become the scarcely noted acces- 
sory of vicissitudes that transcend her own ; to trace the 
passion or the anguish which whirl along some lurid vista 
towards a sun that sets in storm, or gaze across silent 
squares by summer moonlight amid a smell of dust and 
flowers. 

But although Wordsworth passed thus through London 
unmodified and indifferent, the current of things was sweep- 
ino; him on to minirle in a fiercer tumult — to be cauoiht in 



18 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

the tides of a more violent and feverish life. In Novem- 
ber, 1791, he landed in France, meaning to pass the winter 
at Orleans and learn French. Ui^ to this date the French 
Revolution had impressed him in a rather unusual manner 
— namely, as being a matter of course. The explanation 
of this view is a somewhat singular one. Wordsworth's 
was an old family, and his connexions were some of them 
wealthy and well placed in the world ; but the chances of 
his education had been such that he could scarcely realize 
to himself any other than a democratic type of society. 
Scarcely once, he tells us, in his school days had he seen 
boy or man who claimed respect on the score of wealth 
and blood ; and the manly atmosphere of Cambridge pre- 
served even in her lowest days a society 

" Where all stood thus far 
Upon equal ground ; that we were brothers all 
In honour, as in one community, 
Scholars and gentlemen ;" 

while the teachings of nature and the dignity of Cumbrian 
peasant life had confirmed his high opinion of the essen- 
tial worth of man. The upheaval of the French people, 
therefore, and the downfall of privilege, seemed to him no 
portent for good or evil, but rather the tardy return of a 
society to its stable equilibrium. He passed through rev- 
olutionized Paris with satisfaction and sympathy, but with 
little active emotion, and proceeded first to Orleans, and 
then to Blois, between which places he spent nearly a year. 
At Orleans he became intimately acquainted with the nobly- 
born but republican General Beaupuis, an inspiring exam- 
ple of all in the Revolution that was self-devoted and chiv- 
alrous, and had compassion on the wretched poor. In con- 
versation with him Wordsworth learnt with what new force 



n.] RESIDENCE IN LONDON AND IN FRANCE. 19 

the Avell-woni adages of the moralist fall from the lips of 
one Avlio is called upon to put them at once in action, and 
to stake life itself on the verity of his maxims of honour. 
The poet's heart burned within him as he listened. He 
could not, indeed, help mourning sometimes at the sight of 
a dismantled chapel, or peopling in imagination the forest- 
glades in which they sat with the chivalry of a by-gone 
day. But he became increasingly absorbed in his friend's 
ardour, and the Revolution — mulier formosa superne — 
seemed to him big wHh all the hopes of man. 

lie returned to Paris in October, 1792 — a month after 
the massacres of September ; and he has described his agi- 
tation and dismay at the sight of such world-wide desti- 
nies swayed by the hands of such men. In a passage which 
curiously illustrates that reasoned self-confidence and de- 
liberate boldness which for the most part he showed only 
in the peaceful incidents of a literary career, he has told 
us how he was on the point of putting himself forward as 
a leader of the Girondist party, in the conviction that his 
single-heartedness of aim would make him, in spite of foreign 
birth and imperfect speech, a point round which the con- 
fused instincts of the multitude might not impossibly rally. 

Such a course of action — which, whatever its other re- 
sults, would undoubtedly have conducted him to the guil- 
lotine with his political friends in May, 1793 — was ren- 
dered impossible by a somewhat undignified hindrance. 
Wordsworth, while in his own eyes "a patriot of the 
world," was in the eyes of others a young man of twenty- 
two, travelling on a small allowance, and running his head 
into unnecessary dangers. His funds were stopped, and 
he reluctantly returned to England at the close of 1793. 

And now to Wordsworth, as to many other English 
patriots, there came, on a great scale, that form of sorrow 
2 



20 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

which in private life is one of the most agonizing of all 
— when two beloved beings, each of them erring greatly, 
become involved in bitter hate. The new-born Repub- 
lic flung down to Europe as her battle - gage the head of 
a king. England, in an hour of horror that was almost 
panic, accepted the defiance, and war was declared be- 
tween the two countries early in 1793. "No shock," 
says Wordsworth, 

" Given to my moral nature had I known 
Down to that very moment ; neither lapse 
Nor turn of sentiment that might be named 
A revolution, save at this one time ;" 

and the sound of the evening gun-fire at Portsmouth 
seemed at once the embodiment and the premonition of 
England's guilt and woe. 

Yet his distracted spirit could find no comfort in the 
thought of France. For in France the worst came to the 
worst; and everything vanished of liberty except the 
crimes committed in her name. 

" Most melancholy at that time, Friend ! 
Were my day-thoughts, my nights were miserable. 
Through months, through years, long after the last beat 
Of those atrocities, the hour of sleep 
To me came rarely charged with natural gifts — 
Such ghastly visions had I of despair. 
And tyranny, and implements of death ; . . . 
And levity in dungeons, where the dust 
Was laid with tears. Then suddenly the scene 
Changed, and the unbroken dream entangled me 
In long orations, which I strove to plead 
Before unjust tribunals — with a voice 
Labouring, a brain confounded, and a sense, 
Death-like, of treacherous desertion, felt 
In the last place of refuge — my own soul." 



II.] RESIDENCE IN LONDON AND IN FRANCE. 21 

These years of perplexity and disappointment, follow- 
ing on a season of overstrained and violent hopes, were 
the sharpest trial through which Wordsworth ever passed. 
The course of affairs in France, indeed, was such as seem- 
ed by an irony of fate to drive the noblest and firmest 
hearts into the worst aberrations. For first of all in that 
Revolution, Reason had appeared, as it were, in visible 
shape, and hand in hand with Pity and Virtue ; then, as 
the welfare of the oppressed peasantry began to be lost 
sight of amid the brawls of the factions of Paris, all that 
was attractive and enthusiastic in the great movement 
seemed to disappear, but yet Reason might still be thought 
to find a closer realization here than among scenes more 
serene and fair ; and, lastly, Reason set in blood and tyran- 
ny, and there was no more hope from France. But those 
who, like Wordsworth, had been taught by that great con- 
vulsion to disdain the fetters of sentiment and tradition, 
and to look on Reason as supreme, were not willing to re- 
linquish their belief because violence had conquered her in 
one more battle. Rather they clung with the greater te- 
nacity — " adhered," in AVordsworth's words, 

*' More firmly to old tenets, and to prove 
Their temper, strained them more ;" 

cast off more decisively than ever the influences of tradi- 
tion, and in their Utopian visions even wished to see the 
perfected race severed in its perfection from the memories 
of humanity, and from kinship with the struggling past. 

Through a mood of this kind Wordsworth had to travel 
now. And his nature, formed for pervading attachments 
and steady memories, suffered grievously from the priva- 
tion of much which even the coldest and calmest temper 
cannot forego without detriment and pain. For it is not 



22 WOKDSWORTH. [chap. 

with impunity that men commit themselves to the sole 
guidance of either of the two great elements of their be- 
ing. The penalties of trusting to the emotions alone are 
notorious ; and every day affords some instance of a char- 
acter that has degenerated into a bundle of impulses, of a 
will that has become caprice. But the consequences of 
making Reason our tyrant instead of our king are almost 
equally disastrous. There is so little which Reason, divest- 
ed of all emotional or instinctive supports, is able to prove 
to our satisfaction that a sceptical aridity is likely to take 
possession of the soul. It was thus with Wordsworth; 
he was driven to a perpetual questioning of all beliefs and 
analysis of all motives — 

" Till, demanding formal proof. 
And seeking it in everything, I lost 
All feeling of conviction ; and, in fine, 
Sick, wearied out with contrarieties. 
Yielded up moral questions in despair." 

In this mood all those great generalized conceptions 
which are the food of our love, our reverence, our religion, 
dissolve away ; and Wordsworth tells us that at this time 

" Even the visible universe 
Fell under the dominion of a taste 
Less spiritual, with microscopic view 
Was scanned, as I had scanned the moral world." 

He looked on the operations of nature " in disconnection 
dull and spiritless ;" he could no longer apprehend her 
unity nor feel her charm. He retained, indeed, his craving 
for natural beauty, but in an uneasy and fastidious mood — 

" Giving way 
To a comparison of scene with scene, 
Bent overmuch on superficial things, 



II.] RESIDENCE IX LONDON AND IN FRANCE. 23 

Pampering myself with meagre novelties 
Of colour and proportion ; to the moods 
Of time and season, to the moral power, 
The affections, and the spirit of the place, 
Insensible." 

Sucli cold fits are common to all religions ; tbey haunt 
the artist, the philanthropist, the philosopher, the saint. 
Often they are due to some strain of egoism or ambition 
which has intermixed itself with the impersonal desire; 
sometimes, as in Wordsworth's case, to the persistent ten- 
sion of a mind which has been bent too ardently towards 
an ideal scarce possible to man. And in this case, when 
the objects of a man's habitual admiration are true and 
noble, they will ever be found to suggest some antidote 
to the fatigues of their pursuit. We shall see as we pro- 
ceed how a deepening insight into the lives of the peas- 
antry around him — the happiness and virtue of simple 
Cumbrian homes — restored to the poet a serener confi- 
dence in human nature, amid all the shame and downfall 
of such hopes in France. And that still profounder loss 
of delight in Nature herself— that viewing of all things 
" in disconnection dull and spiritless," which, as it has been 
w^ell said, is the truest definition of Atheism, inasmuch as a 
unity in the universe is the first element in our conception 
of God — this dark pathway also was not without its outlet 
into the day. For the God in Nature is not only a God 
of Beauty, but a God of Law ; his unity can be apprehend- 
ed in power as well as in glory ; and Wordsworth's mind, 
"sinking inward upon itself from thought to thought," 
found rest for the time in that austere religion — Hebrew 
at once and scientific, common to a I^ewton and a Job — 
which is fostered by the prolonged contemplation of the 
mere Order of the sum of things. 



24 WORDSWORTH. [chap. ii. 

"Not in vain 
I had been taught to reverence a Power 
That is the visible quality and shape 
And image of right reason." 

Not, indeed, in vain ! For lie felt now that there is no 
side of truth, however remote from human interests, no 
aspect of the universe, however awful and impersonal, 
which may not have power at some season to guide and 
support the spirit of man. When Goodness is obscured, 
when Beauty wearies, there are some souls which still can 
cling and grapple to the conception of eternal Law. 

Of such stern consolations the poet speaks as having 
restored him in his hour of need. But he gratefully 
acknowledges also another solace of a gentler kind. It 
was about this time (l795) that Wordsworth was blessed 
with the permanent companionship of his sister, to whom 
he was tenderly attached, but whom, since childhood, ho 
had seen only at long intervals. Jliss Wordsworth, after 
]ier father's death, had lived mainly with her maternal 
grandfather, Mr. Cookson, at Penrith ; occasionally at Hali- 
fax with other relations ; or at Forncett with her uncle, Dr. 
Cookson, Canon of Windsor. She was now able to join 
her favourite brother ; and in this gifted woman Words- 
worth found a gentler and sunnier likeness of himself ; he 
found a love which never wearied, and a sympathy fervid 
without blindness, whose suggestions lay so directly in his 
mind's natural course that they seemed to spring from the 
same individuality, and to form at once a portion of his 
inmost being. The opening of this new era of domestic 
happiness demands a separate chapter. 



CHAPTER III. 

MISS WORDSWORTH. LYRICAL BALLADS. SETTLEMENT AT 

GRASMERE. 

From among many letters of Miss Wordsworth's to a 
beloved friend (Miss Jane Pollard, afterwards Mrs; Mar- 
shall, of Hallsteads), which have been kindly placed at my 
disposal, I may without impropriety quote a few passages 
which illustrate the character and the affection of brother 
and sister alike. And first, in a letter (Forncett, February, 
1792), comparing her brothers Christopher and William, 
she says: "Christopher is steady and sincere in his at- 
tachments. William has both these virtues in an eminent 
degree, and a sort of violence of affection, if I may so 
term it, which demonstrates itself every moment of the 
day, when the objects of his affection are present with 
him, in a thousand almost imperceptible attentions to 
their wishes, in a sort of restless watchfulness which I 
know not how to describe, a tenderness that never sleeps, 
and at the same time such a delicacy of manner as I have 
observed in few men." And again (Forncett, June, 1793), 
she writes to the same friend : " I have strolled into a 
neighbouring meadow, where I am enjoying the melody 
of birds, and the busy sounds of a fine summer's evening. 
But oh ! how imperfect is my pleasure whilst I am alone ! 
Why are you not seated with me ? and my dear AVilliam, 



26 WOKDSWORTH. [chap. 

why is lie not here also? I could almost fancy that I see 
you both near me. I hear you point out a spot, where, 
if we could erect a little cottage and call it our own, we 
should be the happiest of human beings. I see my brother 
fired with the idea of leading his sister to such a retreat. 
Our parlour is in a moment furnished, our garden is 
adorned by magic ; the roses and honeysuckles spring at 
our command ; the wood behind the house lifts its head, 
and furnishes us with a winter's shelter and a summer's 
noonday shade. My dear friend, I trust that erelong you 
will be, without the aid of imagination, the companion 
of my walks, and my dear William may be of our par- 
ty. .. . He is now going upon a tour in the west of Eng- 
land, with a gentleman who was formerly a school -fel- 
low — a man of fortune, who is to bear all the expenses of 
the journey, and only requests the favour of William's 
company. He is perfectly at liberty to quit this compan- 
ion as soon as anything more advantageous offers. But it 
is enough to say that I am likely to have the happiness of 
introducing you to my beloved brother. You must for- 
give me for talking so much of him ; my affection hurries 
me on, and makes me forget that you cannot be so much 
interested in the subject as I am. You do not know him ; 
you do not know how amiable he is. Perhaps you reply, 
' But I know how blinded you are.' AVell, my dearest, 
I plead guilty at once ; I must be blind ; he cannot be so 
pleasing as my fondness makes him. I am willing to 
allow that half the virtues with which I fancy him en- 
dowed are the creation of my love ; but surely I may be 
excused ! He was never tired of comforting his sister ; 
he never left her in anger ; he always met her with joy ; 
He preferred her society to every other pleasure — or rather, 
wdien we were so happy as to be within each other's reach, 



„i.] MISS WORDSWORTH. 27 

he liad no pleasure when we were compelled to be divided. 
Do not, then, expect too much from this brother of whom 
I have delighted so to talk to you. In the first place, 
you must be with him more than once before he will be 
perfectly easy in conversation. In the second place, his 
person is not in his favour — at least I should think not ; 
but I soon ceased to discover this — nay, I almost thought 
that the opinion which I had formed was erroneous. He 
is, however, certainly rather plain, though otherwise has 
an extremely thoughtful countenance ; but when he speaks 
it is often lighted up by a smile which I think very pleas- 
ing. But enough, he is my brother ; why should I de- 
scribe him ? I shall be launching again into panegyric." 

The brother's language to his sister is equally affection- 
ate. "How much do I wish," he writes in 1793, "that 
each emotion of pleasure or pain that visits your heart 
should excite a similar pleasure or a similar pain within 
me, by that sympathy which will almost identify us when 

•we have stolen to our little cottage I will write to my 

uncle, and tell him that I cannot think of going anywhere 
before I have been with you. AYhatever answer he gives 
me, I certainly will make a point of once more mingling 
my transports with yours. Alas! my dear sister, how 
soon must this happiness expire ; yet there are moments 
worth ages." 

And again, in the same year, he writes, " Oh, my dear, 
dear sister ! with what transport shall I again meet you ! 
with what rapture shall I again wear out the day in your 
sight ! ... I see you in a moment running, or rather fly- 
ing, to my arms." 

Wordsworth was in all things fortunate, but in nothing 
more fortunate than in this, that so unique a companion 
should have been ready to devote herself to him with an 

9* 



28 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

affection wholly free from egoism or jealousy — an affec- 
tion tliat yearned only to satisfy liis subtlest needs, and to 
transfuse all that was best in herself into his larger being. 
And, indeed, that fortunate admixture or influence, whence- 
soever derived, which raised the race of Wordsworth to 
poetic fame, was almost more dominant and conspicuous 
in Dorothy Wordsworth than in the poet himself. " The 
shooting lights of her wild eyes " reflected to the full the 
strain of imaginative emotion which was mingled in the 
poet's nature with that spirit of steadfast and conserva- 
tive virtue which has already given to the family a Mas- 
ter of Trinity, two Bishops, and other divines and schol- 
ars of weight and consideration. In the poet himself the 
conservative and ecclesiastical tendencies of his character 
became more and more apparent as advancing years 
stiffened the movements of the mind. In his sister the 
ardent element was less restrained ; it showed itself in a 
most innocent direction, but it brought with it a heavy 
punishment. Her passion for nature and her affection foF 
her brother led her into mountain rambles which were be- 
yond her strength, and her last years were spent in a con- 
dition of physical and mental decay. 

But at the time of which we are now speaking there 
was, perhaps, no one in the world who could have been to 
the poet such a companion as his sister became. She had 
not, of course, his grasp of mind or his poetic power ; but 
her sensitiveness to nature was quite as keen as his, and 
her disposition resembled his " with sunshine added to 
daylight." 

" Birds in the bower, and lambs in the green field, 
Could they have known her, would have loved ; methought 
Iler very presence such a sweetness breathed, 
That flowers, and trees, and even the silent hills, 



i„.] MISS WORDSWORTH. 29 

And everything she looked on, should have had 
An inthnation how she bore herself 
Towards them, and to all creatures." 

Her journal of a tour in Scotland, and lier description 
of a week on TJllswater, affixed to Wordsworth's Guide to 
the Za^TS— diaries not written for publication, but merely 
to communicate her own delight to intimate friends at a 
distance — are surely indescribably attractive in their naive 
and tender feeling-, combined with a delicacy of insight 
into natural beauty which w^as almost a new thing in the 
history of the world. If we compare, for instance, any of 
her descriptions of the Lakes with Southey's, we see the 
differenc3 between mere literary skill, which can now be 
rivalled in many quarters, and that sympathetic intuition 
which comes of love alone. Even if we compare her with 
Gray, whose short notice of Cumberland bears on every 
page the stamp of a true poet, we are struck by the way 
in which Miss Wordsworth's tenderness for all living 
things gives character and pathos to her landscapes, and 
evokes from the wildest solitude some note that thrills the 

heart. 

" She gave ine eyes, she gave me ears. 
And humble cares, and delicate fears ; 
A heart the fountain of sweet tears ; 
And love, and thought, and joy." 

The cottage life in her brother's company, which we 
have seen Miss AVordsworth picturing to herself with girl- 
ish ardour, was destined to be realized no long time af- 
terwards, thanks to the unlooked-for outcome of another 
friendship. If the poet's sister was his first admirer, Rais- 
ley Calvert may fairly claim the second place. Calvert 
was the son of the steward of the Duke of Norfolk, who 
possessed large estates in Cumberland. He attached him- 



30 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

self to Wordsworth, and in 1793 and 1794 tlie friends 
were much together. Calvert was then attacked by con- 
sumption, and Wordsworth nursed him with patient care. 
It was j^ound at his death that he had left his friend a 
legacy of 900^. " The act," says Wordsworth, " was done 
entirely from a confidence on his part that I had powers 
and attainments which might be of use to mankind. Upon 
the interest of the 900/. — 400/. being laid out in annuity 
— with 200/. deducted from the principal, and 100/. a leg- 
acy to my sister, and 100/. more which the Lyrical Bal- 
lads have brought me, my sister and I contrived to live 
seven years, nearly eight." 

Trusting in this small capital, and with nothing to look 
to in the future except the uncertain prospect of the pay- 
ment of Lord Lonsdale's debt to the family, Wordsworth 
settled with his sister at Racedown, near Crewkerne, in 
Dorsetshire, in the autumn of 1795, the choice of this lo- 
cality being apparently determined by the offer of a cot- 
tage on easy terms. Here, in the first home which he 
had possessed, Wordsworth's steady devotion to poetry 
began. lie had already, in 1792,^ published two little 
poems, the Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches, which 
Miss Wordsworth (to whom the Evening Walk was ad- 
dressed) criticises with candour in a letter to the same 
friend (Forncett, February, 1792) : 

" The scenes which he describes have been viewed with 
a poet's eye, and are portrayed with a poet's pencil ; and 
the poems contain many passages exquisitely beautiful ; 
but they also contain many faults, the chief of which are 
obscurity and a too frequent use of some particular ex- 
pressions and uncommon words; for instance, moveless, 

1 The Memoirs say in 1793, but the following MS. letter of 1792 
speaks of them as already published. 



III.] LYRICAL BALLADS. 31 

which he applies in a sense, if not new, at least different 
from its ordinary one. By ' moveless,' when applied to 
the swan, he means that sort of motion which is smooth 
without agitation ; it is a very beautiful epithet, but ought 
to have been cautiously used. The word viewless also is 
introduced far too often. I regret exceedingly that he did 
not submit the works to the inspection of some friend before 
their publication, and he also joins with me in this regret." 

These poems show a careful and minute observation of 
nature, but their versification — still reminding us of the 
imitators of Pope — has little originality or charm. They 
attracted the admiration of Coleridge, but had no further 
success. 

At Racedown Wordsworth finished Guilt and Sorroiu, 
a poem gloomy in tone and written mainly in his period 
of depression and unrest ; and wrote a tragedy called The 
Borderers, of which only a few lines show any promise of 
future excellence. He then wrote The Ruined Cottage, 
now incorporated in the First Book of the Excursion. 
This poem, on a subject thoroughly suited to his powers, 
w^as his first work of merit; and Coleridge, who visited 
the quiet household in June, 1797, pronounces this poem 
" superior, I hesitate not to aver, to anything in our lan- 
guage which in any way resembles it." In July, 1797, the 
Wordsworths removed to Alfoxden, a large house in Som- 
ersetshire, near Netherstov/ey, where Coleridge was at that 
time living. Here AVordsworth added to his income by 
taking as pupil a young boy, the hero of the trifling poem 
Anecdote for Fathers, a son of Mr. Basil Montagu ; and 
here he composed many of his smaller pieces. He has 
described the origin of the Ancient Mariner and the Lyri- 
cal Ballads in a w^ell-known passage, part of which I must 
here repeat: 



32 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

"In the autumn of 1'797, Mr. Coleridge, my sister, and myself 
started from Alfoxden pretty late in the afternoon, with a view to 
visit Linton, and the Valley of Stones near to it ; and as our united 
funds were very small, we agreed to defray the expense of the tour 
by writing a poem, to be sent to the New Monthly Magazine. In the 
course of this walk was planned the poem of the Aficient Mariner^ 
founded on a dream, as Mr. Coleridge said, of his friend Mr. Cruik- 
shank. Much the greatest part of the story was Mr. Coleridge's in- 
vention ; but certain parts I suggested : for example, some crime 
was to be committed which was to bring upon the Old Navigator, as 
Coleridge afterwards delighted to call him, the spectral persecution, 
as a consequence of that crime and his own wanderings. I had 
been reading in Shelvocke's Voyages^ a day or two before, that while 
doubling Cape Horn they frequently saw albatrosses in that latitude, 
the largest sort of sea-fowl, some extending their wings twelve or 
thirteen feet. ' Suppose,' said T, ' you represent him as having kill- 
ed one of these birds on entering the South Sea, and that the tutelary 
spirits of these regions take upon them to avenge the crime. The 
incident was thought fit for the purpose, and adopted according- 
ly. I also suggested the navigation of the ship by the dead man, 
but do not recollect that I had anything more to do with the scheme 
of the poem. We began the composition together, on that to me 
memorable evening. I furnished two or three lines at the beginning 
of the poem, in particular — 

" ' And listened like a three years' child ; 
The Mariner had his will.' 

As we endeavoured to proceed conjointly our respective manners 
proved so widely different, that it would have been quite presumpt- 
uous in me to do anything but separate from an undertaking upon 
which I could only have been a clog. The Ancient Mariner grew and 
grew, till it became too important for our first object, which was lim- 
ited to our expectation of five pounds ; and we began to think of a 
volume, which was to consist, as Mr. Coleridge has told the world, of 
poems chiefly on supernatural subjects, taken from common life, but 
looked at, as much as might be, through an imaginative medium." 

The volume of Lyrical Ballads, whose first beginnings 
have here been traced, was published in the autumn of 



III.] LYRICAL BALLADS. 33 

1798, by Mr. Cottle, at Bristol. This volume contained 
several poems wliicb have been justly blamed for triviality 
—as The Thorn, Goody Blake, The Idiot Boy ; several in 
which, as in Simon Lee, triviality is mingled with much 
real pathos ; and some, as Expostulation and Reply and 
The Tables Turned, which are of the very essence of 
Wordsworth's nature. It is hardly too much to say that, 
if these two last-named poems — to the careless eye so slight 
and trifling- — were all that had remained from Words- 
worth's hand, they would have " spoken to the compre- 
hending" of a new individuality, as distinct and unmis- 
takable in its way as that which Sappho has left engraven 
on the world forever in words even fewer than these. 
And the volume ended with a poem which Wordsworth 
composed in 1798, in one day, during a tour with his sis- 
ter to Tintern and Chepstow. The Lines loritten above 
Tintern Abbey have become, as it were, the locus classi- 
cus, or consecrated formulary of the Wordsworthian faith. 
They say in brief what it is the work of the poet's biog- 
rapher to say in detail. 

As soon as this volume was published AVordsworth and 
his sister sailed for Hamburg, in the hope that their im- 
perfect acquaintance with the German language might be 
improved by the heroic remedy of a winter at Goslar. But 
at Goslar they do not seem to have made any acquaintances, 
and their self -improvement consisted mainly in reading 
German books to themselves. The four months spent at 
Goslar, however, were the very bloom of Wordsworth's 
poetic career. Through none of his poems has the peculiar 
loveliness of English scenery and English girlhood shone 
more delicately than through those which came to him as 
he paced the frozen gardens of that desolate city. Here 
it was that he wrote Lucy Gray, and Ruth, and Nutting, 



84 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

and the Poet's E'pitaph^ and other poems known now to 
most men as possessing in its full fragrance his especial 
charm. And here it was that the memory of some emo- 
tion prompted the lines on Lucy. Of the history of that 
emotion he has told us nothing ; I forbear, therefore, to 
inquire concerning it, or even to speculate. That it was to 
the poet's honour, I do not doubt ; but who ever learned 
such secrets rightly ? or who should wish to learn ? It is 
best to leave the sanctuary of all hearts inviolate, and to 
respect the reserve not only of the living but of the dead. 
Of these poems, almost alone, Wordsworth in his autobio- 
graphical notes has said nothing whatever. One of them 
he suppressed for years, and printed only in a later volume. 
One can, indeed, well imagine that there may be poems 
whicli a man may be willing to give to the world only in 
the hope that their pathos will be, as it were, protected by 
its own intensity, and that those who are worthiest to com- 
prehend will be least disposed to discuss them. 

The autobiographical notes on his own works above al- 
luded to were dictated by the poet to his friend Miss Isa- 
bella Fenwick, at her urgent request, in 1843, and preserve 
many interesting particulars as to the circumstances under 
which each poem was composed. They are to be found 
printed entire among Wordsworth's prose works, and I 
shall therefore cite them only occasionally. Of Lucy Gray, 
for instance, he says — 

" It was founded on a circumstance told me by my sister, of a lit- 
tle girl who, not far from Halifax, in Yorkshire, was bewildered in a 
snow-storm. Her footsteps were tracked by her parents to the mid- 
dle of the lock of a canal, and no other vestige of her, backward or 
forward, could be traced. The body, however, was found in the canal. 
The way in which the incident was treated, and the spiritualizing of 
the character, mi^ht furnish hints for contrasting the imaginative 



III.] LYRICAL BALLADS. 35 

influences which I have endeavoured to throw over common Ufe, with 
Crabbe's matter-of-fact style of handling subjects of the same kind." 

And of the Lines iciitten in Germany^ 1798-99 — 

"A bitter wunter it was when these verses were composed by the 
side of my sister, in our lodgings, at a draper's house, in the romantic 
imperial town of Goslar, on the edge of the Hartz forest. So severe 
was the cold of this winter that, when we passed out of the parlour 
warmed by the stove, our cheeks w^ere struck by the air as by cold 
iron. I slept in a room over a passage that was not ceiled. The 
people of the house used to say, rather unfeelingly, that they expect- 
ed I should be frozen to death some night ; but with the protection 
of a pelisse lined with fur, and a dog's-skin bonnet, such as was worn 
by the peasants, I walked daily on the ramparts or on a sort of pub- 
lic ground or garden, in which was a pond. Here I had no compan- 
ion but a kingfisher, a beautiful creature that used to glance by me. 
I consequently became much attached to it. During these walks I 
composed The Pocfs EpitapliP 

Seldom has there been a more impressive instance of the 
contrast, familiar to biographers, between the apparent in- 
significance and the real importance of their hero in undis- 
tinguished youth. To any one considering Wordsworth 
as he then was — a rough and somewhat stubborn young 
man, who, in nearly thirty years of life, had seemed alter- 
nately to idle without grace and to study without ad- 
vantage — it might well have seemed incredible that he 
could have anything new or valuable to communicate to 
manlvind. Where had been his experience ? or where was 
the indication of that wealth of sensuous emotion which in 
such a nature as Keats's seems almost to dispense with ex- 
perience, and to give novelty by giving vividness to such 
passions as are known to all ? If Wordsworth were to im- 
press mankind it must be, one might have thought, by 
travelling out of himself altogether — by revealing some 



36 WOKDSWORTH. [chap. 

sncli energy of imagination as can create a world of ro- 
mance and adventure in the shyest heart. But this was 
not so to be. Ah'eady Wordsworth's minor poems had 
dealt almost entirely with his own feelings, and with the 
objects actually before his eyes ; and it Avas at Goslar that 
he planned, and on the day of his qnitting Goslar that he 
began, a much longer poem, whose subject was to be still 
more intimately personal, being the development of his own 
mind. This poem, dedicated to Coleridge, and written in 
the form of a confidence bestowed on an intimate friend, 
was finished in 1805, but was not published till after the 
poet's death. Mrs. Wordsworth then named it The Pre- 
lude, indicating thus the relation which it bears to the Ex- 
cursion — or, rather, to the projected poem of the Recluse, 
of which the Excursion was to form only the Second out 
of three Divisions. One Book of the First Division of the 
Recluse was written, but is yet unpublished ; the Third 
Division was never even begun, and "the materials," we 
are told, " of which it would have been formed have been 
incorporated, for the most part, in the author's other pub- 
lications." Nor need this change of plan be regretted: 
didactic poems admit easily of mutilation ; and all that can 
be called plot in this series of works is contained in the 
Prelude, in which we see Wordsworth arriving at those 
convictions which in the Excursion he pauses to expound. 
It would be too much to say that Wordsworth has been 
wholly successful in the attempt — for such the Prelude 
virtually is — to write an epic poem on his own education. 
Such a poem must almost necessarily appear tedious and 
egoistic, and Wordsworth's manner has not tact enough 
to prevent these defects from being felt to the full. On 
the contrary, in his constant desire frugally to extract, as 
it were, its full teaching from the minutest event which 



ni.] SETTLEMENT AT GRASMERE. 37 

has befallen liim, lie supplements the self-complacency of 
the autobiographer with the conscientious exactness of the 
moralist, and is apt to insist on trifles such as lodge in the 
corners of every man's memory, as if they were unique 
lessons vouchsafed to himself alone. 

Yet it follows from this very temper of mind that there 
is scarcely any autobiography which we can read with such 
implicit confidence as the Prelude. In the case of this, as 
of so many of Wordsworth's productions, our first dissat- 
isfaction at the form which the poem assumes yields to a 
recognition of its fitness to express precisely what the poet 
intends. Nor are there many men who, in recounting the 
story of their own lives, could combine a candour so abso- 
lute with so much of dignity ; who could treat their per- 
sonal history so impartially as a means of conveying les- 
sons of general truth ; or who, while chronicling such small 
things, could remain so great. The Prelude is a book of 
good augury for human nature. We feel in reading it as 
if the stock of mankind were sound. The soul seems go- 
ing on from strength to strength by the mere development 
of her inborn power. And the scene with which the poem 
at once opens and concludes — the return to the Lake coun- 
try as to a permanent and satisfying home — places the 
poet at last amid his true surroundings, and leaves us to 
contemplate him as completed by a harmony without 
him, which he of all men most needed to evoke the har- 
mony within. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE ENGLISH LAKES. 

The lakes and mountains of Cumberland, Westmoreland, 
and Lancashire are singularly fitted to supply such ele- 
ments of moral sustenance as nature's aspects can afford 
to man. There are, indeed, many mountain regions of 
greater awfulness ; but prospects of ice and terror should 
be a rare stimulant rather than an habitual food ; and the 
physical difficulties inseparable from immense elevations 
depress the inhabitant and preoccupy the traveller. There 
are many lakes under a more lustrous sky ; but the healthy 
activities of life demand a scene brilliant without languor, 
and a beauty which can refresh and satisfy rather than lull 
or overpower. Without advancing any untenable claim 
to British pre-eminence in the matter of scenery, we may, 
perhaps, follow on both these points the judgment which 
Wordsworth has expressed in his Guide to the Lakes, a 
work which condenses the results of many years of inti- 
mate observation. 

" Our tracts of wood and water," he says, " are almost 
diminutive in comparison (with Switzerland) ; therefore, 
as far as sublimity is dependent upon absolute bulk and 
height, and atmospherical influences in connexion with 
these, it is obvious that there can be no rivalship. But 
a short residence amonof the British mountains will fur- 



CHAP. IV.] THE ENGLISH LAKES. 39 

nisli abundant proof that, after a certain point of eleva- 
tion, viz., that which allows of compact and fleecy clouds 
settling upon, or sweeping over, the summits, the sense of 
sublimity depends more upon form and relation of objects 
to each other than upon their actual magnitude ; and that 
an elevation of 3000 feet is sufficient to call forth in a 
most impressive degree the creative, and magnifying, and 
softening powers of the atmosphere." 

And again, as to climate: "The rain," he says, "here 
comes down heartily, and is frequently succeeded by clear 
bright weather, when every brook is vocal, and every tor- 
rent sonorous ; brooks and torrents which are never muddy 
even in the heaviest floods. Days of unsettled weather, 
with partial showers, are very frequent ; but the showers, 
darkening or brightening as they fly from hill to hill, are 
not less grateful to the eye than finely interwoven pas- 
sages of gay and sad music are touching to the ear. Va- 
pours exhaling from the lakes and meadows after sunrise 
in a hot season, or in moist weather brooding upon the 
heights, or descending towards the valleys with inaudible 
motion, give a visionary character to everything around 
them ; and are in themselves so beautiful as to dispose us 
to enter into the feelings of those simple nations (such as 
the Laplanders of this day) by whom they are taken for 
guardian deities of the mountains ; or to sympathize with 
others who have fancied these delicate apparitions to be 
the spirits of their departed ancestors. Akin to these are 
fleecy clouds resting upon the hill-tops ; they are not easi- 
ly managed in picture, with their accompaniments of blue 
sky, but how glorious are they in nature ! how pregnant 
with imagination for the poet! And the height of 
the Cumbrian mountains is suflScient to exhibit daily 
and hourly instances of those mysterious attachments. 



40 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

Siicli clouds, cleaving to their stations, or lifting up sud- 
denly their glittering heads from behind rocky barriers, 
or hurrying out of sight with speed of the sharpest edge, 
will often tempt an inhabitant to congratulate himself on 
belonging to a country of mists and clouds and storms, 
and make him think of the blank sky of Egypt, and of the 
cerulean vacancy of Italy, as an unanimated and even a sad 
spectacle." 

The consciousness of a preceding turmoil brings home 
to us best the sense of perfect peace ; and a climate accus- 
tomed to storm-cloud and tempest can melt sometimes 
into " a day as still as heaven," with a benignant tranquil- 
lity whicli calmer regions can scarcely know. Suck a day 
Wordsworth has described in language of such delicate 
truth and beauty as only a long and intimate love can 
inspire : 

" It has been said that in human Ufe there are moments worth 
ages. In a more subdued tone of sympathy may we affirm, that in 
the dimate of England there are, for the lover of nature, days which 
are worth whole months, I might say, even years. One of these fa- 
voured days sometimes occurs in spring-time, when that soft air is 
breathing over the blossoms and new-born verdure which inspired 
Buchanan with his beautiful Ode to the First of May ; the air which, 
in the luxuriance of his fancy, he likens to that of the golden age — 
to that which gives motion to the funereal cypresses on the banks of 
Lethe; to the air which is to salute beatified spirits when expiatory 
fires shall have consumed the earth with all her habitations. But it 
is in autumn that days of such affecting influence most frequently in- 
tervene. The atmosphere seems refined, and the sky rendered more 
crystalline, as the vivifying heat of the year abates ; the lights and 
shadows are more delicate ; the colouring is richer and more finely 
harmonized ; and, in this season of stillness, the ear being unoccu- 
pied, or only gently excited, the sense of vision becomes more suscep- 
tible of its appropriate enjoyments. A resident in a country like this 
which we are treating of will agree with me that the presence of a 



IV.] THE ENGLISH LAKES. 41 

lake is indispensable to exhibit in perfection the beauty of one of 
these da3's ; and he must have experienced, while looking on the un- 
ruffled waters, that the imagination by their aid is carried into recess- 
es of feeling otherwise impenetrable. The reason of this is, that the 
heavens are not only brought down into the bosom of the earth, but 
that the earth is mainly looked at, and thought of, through the me- 
dium of a purer element. The happiest time is when the equinoctial 
gales are departed ; but their fury may probably be called to mind 
by the sight of a few shattered boughs, whose leaves do not differ in 
colour from the faded foliage of the stately oaks from which these 
relics of the storm depend : all else speaks of tranquillity ; not a 
breath of air, no restlessness of insects, and not a moving object per- 
ceptible — except the clouds gliding in the depths of the lake, or the 
traveller passing along, an inverted image, whose motion seems gov- 
erned by the quiet of a time to which its archetype, the living per- 
son, is perhaps insensible ; or it may happen that the figure of one 
of the larger birds, a raven or a heron, is crossing silently among the 
reflected clouds, while the voice of the real bird, from the element 
aloft, gently awakens in the spectator the recollection of appetites 
and instincts, pursuits and occupations, that deform and agitate the 
world, yet have no power to prevent nature from putting on an as- 
pect capable of satisfying the most intense cravings for the tranquil, 
the lovely, and the perfect, to w^hich man, the noblest of her creat- 
ures, is subject." 

The scene described here is one as exquisite in detail as 
majestic in general effect. And it is characteristic of the 
region to which Wordsworth's love was given that there is 
no corner of it without a meaning and a charm ; that the 
open record of its immemorial past tells us at every turn 
that all agencies have conspired for loveliness and ruin it- 
self has been benign. A passage of Wordsworth's describ- 
ing the character of the lake -shores illustrates this fact 
with loving minuteness : 

" Sublimity is the result of nature's first great dealings with the 
superficies of the Earth ; but the general tendency of her subsequent 
operations is towards the production of beauty, by a multiplicity of 



42 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

symmetrical parts uniting in a consistent whole. This is everywhere 
exemplified along the margins of these lakes. Masses of rock, that 
have been precipitated from the heights into the area of waters, lie 
in some i3laces like stranded ships, or have acquired the compact 
structure of jutting piers, or project in little peninsulas crested with 
native wood. The smallest rivulet, one whose silent influx is scarce- 
ly noticeable in a season of dry weather, so faint is the dimple made 
by it on the surface of the smooth lake, will be found to have been 
not useless in shaping, by its deposits of gravel and soil in time of 
flood, a curve that would not otherwise have existed. But the more 
powerful brooks, encroaching upon the level of the lake, have, in 
course of time, given birth to ample promontories of sweeping out- 
line, that contrast boldly with the longitudinal base of the steeps on 
the opposite shore ; while their flat or gently-sloping surfaces never 
fail to introduce, into the midst of desolation and barrenness, the el- 
ements of fertility, even where the habitations of men may not have 
been raised." 

With this we may contrast, as a companion picture, the 
poet's description of the tarns, or lonely bodies of water, 
which lie here and there among the hills : 

" They are difficult of access and naked ; yet some of them are, in 
their permanent forms, very grand, and there are accidents of things 
which would make the meanest of them interesting. At all events, 
one of these pools is an acceptable sight to the mountain wanderer, 
not merely as an incident th^t diversifies the prospect, but as form- 
ing in his mind a centre or conspicuous point to which objects, other- 
wise disconnected or insubordinated, may be referred. Some few 
have a varied outline, with bold heath - clad promontories ; and as 
they mostly lie at the foot of a steep precipice, the water, where the 
sun is not shining upon it, appears black and sullen, and round the 
margin huge stones and masses of rock are scattered, some defying 
conjecture as to the means by which they came thither, and others 
obviously fallen from on high, the contribution of ages. A not un- 
pleasing sadness is induced by this perplexity and these images of 
decay ; while the prospect of a body of pure water, unattended with 
groves and other cheerful rural images by which fresh water is usu- 
ally accompanied, and unable to give furtherance to the meagre veg- 



IV.] THE ENGLISH LAKES. 43 

ctatiou around it, excites a sense of some repulsive power strongly 
put forth, and thus deepens the melancholy natural to such scenes." 

To tliose who love to deduce the chavactcr of a popu- 
lation from the character of their race and surroundings 
the peasantry of Cumberland and AVestmoreland form an 
attractive theme. Drawn in great part from the strong 
Scandinavian stock, they dwell in a land solemn and 
beautiful as Norway itself, but without Norway's rigour 
and penury, and with still lakes and happy rivers instead 
of Norway's inarming melancholy sea. They are a moun- 
tain folk ; but their mountains are no precipices of insu- 
perable snow, such as keep the dwellers in some Swiss 
hamlet shut in ignorance and stagnating into idiocy. 
These barriers divide only to concentrate, and environ 
only to endear ; their guardianship is but enough to give 
an added unity to each group of kindred homes. And 
thus it is that the Cumbrian dalesmen have afforded 
perhaps as near a realization as human fates have yet 
allowed of the rural society Avhich statesmen desire for 
their country's greatness. They have given an example 
of substantial comfort strenuously won ; of home affec- 
tions intensified by independent strength ; of isolation 
without ignorance, and of a shrewd simplicity; of an 
hereditary virtue which needs no support from fanaticism, 
and to which honour is more than law. 

The school of political economists, moreover, who urge 
the advantage of a peasant proprietary, of small inde- 
pendent holdings — as at once drawing from the land the 
fullest produce and rearing upon it the most vigorous 
and provident population — this school, as is well known, 
finds in the statesmen of Cumberland one of its favourite 
examples. In the days of border-wars, when the first ob- 
3 



44 WOEDSWOKTH. [chap. 

ject was to secure the existence of as many armed men 
as possible, in readiness to repel tlie Scot, the abbeys and 
great proprietors in the north readily granted small estates 
on military tenure, which tenure, when personal service 
in the field was no longer needed, became in most cases 
an absolute ownership. The attachment of these states- 
men to their hereditary estates, the heroic efforts which 
they would make to avoid parting with them, formed an 
impressive phenomenon in the little world — a world at 
once of equality and of conservatism — which was the 
scene of Wordsworth's childish years, and which remained 
his manhood's ideal. 

The growth of large fortunes in England, and the in- 
creased competition for land, has swallowed up many of 
these small independent holdings in the extensive prop- 
erties of wealthy men. And at the same time the spread 
of education, and the improved poor-laws and other leg- 
islation, by raising the condition of other parts of Eng- 
land, have tended to obliterate the contrast which was so 
marked in Wordsworth's day. How marked that con- 
trast was, a comparison of Crabbe's poems with Words- 
worth's will sufficiently indicate. Both are true painters ; 
but while in the one we see poverty as something gross 
and degrading, and the Tales of the Village stand out 
from a background of pauperism and crime ; in the other 
picture poverty means nothing worse than privation, and 
the poet in the presence of the most tragic outcast of 
fortune could still 

" Have laughed himself to scorn to find 
In that decrepit man so firm a mind." 

Nay, even when a state far below the Leech- Gatherer'' s has 
been reached, and mind and body alike are in their last 



IV.] THE ENGLISH LAKES. 45 

decay, the life of the Old Cumberland Beggar^ at one re- 
move from nothingness, has yet a dignity and a useful- 
ness of its own. His fading days are passed in no sad 
asylum of vicious or gloomy age, but amid neighbourly 
kindnesses, and in the sanity of the open air ; and a life 
that is reduced to its barest elements has yet a hold on 
the liberality of nature and the affections of human hearts. 
So long as the inhabitants of a region so solitary and 
beautiful have neither many arts nor many wishes, save 
such as the nature which they know has suggested, and 
their own handiwork can satisfy, so long are their presence 
and habitations likely to be in harmony with the scenes 
around them. Nay, man's presence is almost always 
needed to draw out the full meaning of Nature, to illus- 
trate her bounty by his glad well-being, and to hint by 
his contrivances of precaution at her might and terror, 
Wordsworth's description of the cottages of Cumberland 
depicts this unconscious adaptation of man's abode to his 
surroundings, with an eye which may be called at pleas- 
ure that of painter or of poet. 

" The dwelling-houses and contiguous out-houses are in many in- 
stances of the colour of the native rock out of which they have been 
built ; but frequently the dwelling — or Fire-house, as it is ordinarily 
called — has been distinguished from the barn or byre by roughcast 
and whitewash, which, as the inhabitants are not hasty in renewing 
it, in a few years acquires by the influence of weather a tint at once 
sober and variegated. As these houses have been, from father to 
son, inhabited by persons engaged in the same occupations, yet nec- 
essarily with changes in their circumstances, they have received 
without incongruity additions and accommodations adapted to the 
needs of each successive occupant, who, being for the most part pro- 
prietor, was at liberty to follow his own fancy, so that these humble 
dwellings remind the contemplative spectator of a production of 
nature, and may (using a strong expression) rather be said to have 
grown than to have been erected — to have risen, by an instinct of 



46 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

their own, out of tlie native rock — so little is there iu them of for- 
mality, such is their wildness and beauty. 

" These dwellings, mostly built, as has been said, of rough unhewn 
stone, are roofed Avith slates, which were rudely taken from the 
quarry before the present art of splitting them was understood, and 
are therefore rough and uneven in their surface, so that both the 
coverings and sides of the houses have furnished places of rest for 
the seeds of lichens, mosses, ferns, and flowers. Hence buildings, 
which in their very form call to mind the processes of nature, do 
thus, clothed in part with a vegetable garb, appear to be received 
into the bosom of the living principle of things, as it acts and exists 
among the woods and fields, and by their colour and their shape 
affectingly direct the thoughts to that tranquil course of nature and 
simplicity along which the humble-minded inhabitants have through 
so many generations been led. Add the little garden with its shed 
for bee-hives, its small bed of potherbs, and its borders and patches 
of flowers for Sunday posies, with sometimes a choice few too much 
prized to be plucked ; an orchard of proportioned size ; a cheese- 
press, often supported by some tree near the door ; a cluster of 
embowering sycamores for summer shade, with a tall fir through 
which the winds sing when other trees are leafless ; the little rill 
or household spout murmuring in all seasons : combine these in- 
cidents and images together, and you have the representative idea 
of a mountain cottage in this country — so beautifully formed in 
itself, and so richly adorned by the hand of Nature." 

These brief descriptions may suffice to indicate the 
general character of a district which in Wordsworth's 
early days had a distinctive unity which he was the first 
fully to appreciate, which was at its best during his long 
lifetime, and which has already begim to disappear. The 
mountains had waited long for a full adoration, an in- 
telligent worship. At last " they were enough beloved." 
And if now the changes wrought around them recall too 
often the poet's warning, how 

"All that now delights thee, from the day 
On which it should be touched, shall melt, and melt away — " 



IV.] THE ENGLISH LAKES. 41 

yet they have gained sometliing which cannot be taken 
from them. Not mines, nor railways, nor monster ex- 
cursions, nor reservoirs, nor Manchester herself, " toute 
entiere a sa proie attachee," can deprive lake and hill of 
Wordsworth's memory, and the love which once they 
knew. 

Wordsworth's life was from the very first so ordered as 
to give him the most complete and intimate knowledge 
both of district and people. There was scarcely a mile of 
ground in the Lake country over which he had not wan- 
dered ; scarcely a prospect which was not linked with his 
life by some tie of memory. Born at Cockermouth, on 
the outskirts of the district, his mind was gradually led 
on to its beauty ; and his first recollections were of Der- 
went's grassy holms and rocky falls, with Skiddaw, "bronzed 
with deepest radiance," towering in the eastern sky. Sent 
to school at Hawkshead at eight years old, Wordsworth's 
scene was transferred to the other extremity of the Lake 
district. It was in this quaint old town, on the banks of 
Esthwaite Water, that the "fair seed-time of his soul" 
w^as passed ; it was here that his boyish delight in exercise 
and adventure grew, and melted in its turn into a more 
impersonal yearning, a deeper absorption into the beauty 
and the wonder of the world. And even the records of 
his boyish amusements come to us each on a background 
of nature's majesty and calm. Setting springs for wood- 
cock on the grassy moors at night, at nine years old, he 
feels himself "a trouble to the peace" that dwells among 
the moon and stars overhead ; and wdien he has appro- 
priated a woodcock caught by somebody else, " sounds of 
undistinguishable motion " embody the viewless pursuit 
of Nemesis among the solitary hills. In the perilous 
search for the raven's nest, as he hangs on the face of the 



48 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

naked crags of Yewdale, he feels for the first time that 
sense of detachment from external things which a position 
of strange unreality will often force on the mind. 

*' Oh, at that time 
When on the perilous ridge I hung alone, 
With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind 
Blow through my ear ! the sky seemed not a sky 
Of earth — and with what motion moved the clouds !'^ 

The innocent rapine of nutting taught liim to feel that 
there is a spirit in the woods — a presence wdiich too rude 
a touch of ours will desecrate and destroy. 

The neighbouring lakes of Coniston, Esthwaite, Winder- 
mere, have left similar traces of the gradual upbuilding of 
his spirit. It was on a promontory on Coniston that the 
sun's last rays, gilding the eastern hills above which he 
had first appeared, suggested the boy's first impulse of 
spontaneous poetry, in the resolve that, wherever life should 
lead him, his last thoughts should fall on the scenes where 
his childhood was passing now. It was on Esthwaite that 
the "huge peak" of Wetherlam, following him (as it 
seemed) as he rowed across the starlit water, suggested the 
dim conception of " unknown modes of being," and a life 
that is not ours. It was round Esthwaite that the boy 
used to wander with a friend at early dawn, rejoicing in 
the charm of words in tuneful order, and repeating to- 
gether their favourite verses, till "sounds of exultation 
echoed through the groves." It was on Esthwaite that 
the band of skaters "hissed along the polished ice in 
games confederate," from which Wordsworth would some- 
times withdraw himself and pause suddenly in full career, 
to feel in that dizzy silence the mystery of a rolling world. 

A passage, less frequently quoted, in describing a boat- 



IV.] THE ENGLISH LAKES. . 49 

ing* excursion on Windermere illustrates the effect of some 
small point of human interest in concentrating and realis- 
ing the diffused emotion which radiates from a scene of 

beauty : 

" But, ere nightfall, 
When in our pinnace we returned at leisure 
Over the shadowy lake, and to the beach 
Of some small island steered our course with one, 
The minstrel of the troop, and left him there, 
And rowed off gently, while he blew his flute 
Alone upon the rock — oh, then the calm 
And dead still water lay upon my mind 
Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky, 
Never before so beautiful, sank down 
Into my heart, and held me like a dream !" 

The passage which describes the school-boy's call to the 
owls — the lines of which Coleridge said that he should 
have exclaimed " AVordsworth !" if he had met them run- 
ning wild in the deserts of Arabia — paints a somewhat 
similar rush of feeling with a still deeper charm. The 
"gentle shock of mild surprise" which in the pauses of 
the birds' jocund din carries far into his heart the sound 
of mountain torrents — the very mingling of the grotesque 
and the majestic — brings home the contrast between our 
transitory energies and the mystery around us which re- 
turns ever the same to the moments when we pause and 
are at peace. 

It is round the two small lakes of Grasmere and Rydal 
that the memories of Wordsworth are most thickly clus- 
tered. On one or other of these lakes he lived for fifty 
years — the first half of the present century ; and there is 
not in all that region a hill-side walk or winding valley 
which has not heard him murmuring out his verses as 
they slowly rose from his heart. The cottage at Town- 



50 WORDSWOKTH. [chap. 

end, Grasmere, where he first settled, is now surrounded 
by the out-buildings of a busy hotel, and the noisy stream 
of traffic, and the sight of the many villas which spot the 
valley, give a new pathos to the sonnet in which Words- 
worth deplores the alteration which even his own residence 
might make in the simplicity of the lonely scene : 

" Well may'st thou halt, and gaze with brightening eye ! 
The lovely cottage in the guardian nook 
Hath stirred thee deeply ; with its own dear brook, 
Its own small pasture, almost its own sky ! 
But covet not the abode : forbear to sigh, 
As many do, repining while they look ; 
Intruders — who would tear from Nature's book 
This precious leaf with harsh impiety. 
Think what the home must be if it were thine. 
Even thine, though few thy wants ! Roof, window, door, 
The very flowers are sacred to the poor. 
The I'oses to the porch which they entwine : 
Yea, all that now enchants thee, from the day 
On which it should be touched, would melt, and melt away." 

The Poems on the Naming of Places belong for the 
most part to this neighbourhood. Emmah Dell on Eas- 
dale Beck, Point Rash-Judgment on the eastern shore of 
Grasmere, Mary's Pool in Rydal Park, Willia.m^s Peak on 
Stone Arthur, Joanna's Rock on the banks of Rotha, and 
John's Grove near White Moss Common, have been iden- 
tified by the loving search of those to whom every memo- 
rial of that simple-hearted family group has still a charm. 

It is on Grcenhead Ghyll — "upon the forest -side in 
Grasmere Vale " — that the poet has laid the scene of Mi- 
chael, the poem which paints with such detailed fidelity 
both the inner and the outward life of a typical West- 
moreland "statesman." And the upper road from Gras- 
mere to Rydal, superseded now by the road along the lake- 



iv.J THE ENGLISH LAKES. 51 

side, and left as a winding foot-patli among rock and fern, 
was one of his most habitual haunts. Of another such 
haunt his friend Lady Richardson says, " The Prelude was 
chiefly composed in a green mountain terrace, on the Eas- 
dale side of Helm Crag, known by the name of Under Lan- 
crigg, a place which he used to say he knew by heart. The 
ladies sat at their work on the hill-side, while he walked to 
and fro on the smooth green mountain turf, humming out 
his verses to himself, and then repeating them to his sym- 
pathising and ready scribes, to be noted down on the spot, 
and transcribed at home." 

The neighbourhood of the poet's later home at Rydal 
Mount is equally full of associations. Two of the Evening 
Voluntaries were composed by the side of Rydal Mere. 
The Wild Duck'^s Nest was on one of the Rydal islands. 
It was on the fells of Loughrigg that the poet's fancy 
loved to plant an imperial castle. And WansfelVs green 
slope still answers with many a change of glow and shad- 
ow to the radiance of the sinking sun. 

Hawkshead and Rydal, then, may be considered as the 
poet's principal centres, and the scenery in their neigh- 
bourhood has received his most frequent attention. The 
Duddon, a seldom-visited stream on the south-west border 
of the Lake district, has been traced by him from source 
to outfall in a series of sonnets. Langdale, and Little 
Langdale, with Blea Tarn lying in it, form the principal 
scene of the discourses in the Excursion. The more dis- 
tant lakes and mountains were often visited, and are often 
alluded to. The scene of The Brothers, for example, is 
laid in Ennerdale ; and the index of the minor poems will 
supply other instances. But it is chiefly round two lines 
of road leading from Grasmere that Wordsworth's associa- 
tions cluster — the route over Dunmailraise, which led him 
3* 



52 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

to Keswick, to Coleridge and Soutliey at Greta Hall, and 
to other friends in that neighbourhood; and the route 
over Kirkstone, which led him to Ullswater, and the friend- 
ly houses of Patterdale, Hallsteads, and Lowther Castle. 
The first of these two routes was that over which the 
Waggoner plied ; it skirts the lovely shore of Thirlmere 
— a lonely sheet of water, of exquisite irregularity of out- 
line, and fringed with delicate verdure, which the Corpora- 
tion of Manchester has lately bought to embank it into a 
reservoir. Dedecorum 'pretiosus emiotor! This lake was 
a favourite haunt of Wordsworth's ; and upon a rock on 
its margin, where he and Coleridge, coming from Keswick 
and Grasmere, would often meet, the two poets, with the 
other members of Wordsworth's loving household group, 
inscribed the initial letters of their names. To the " mon- 
umental power " of this Rock of Names Wordsworth ap- 
peals, in lines written when the happy company who en- 
graved them had already been severed by distance and 
death : 

" thought of pain, 

Thcat would impair it or profane ! 

And fail not Thou, loved Rock, to keep 

Thy charge when we are laid asleep." 

The rock may still be seen, but is to be submerged in the 
new reservoir. In the vale of Keswick itself, Applethwaite, 
Skiddaw, St. Herbert's Island, Lodore, are commemorated 
in sonnets or inscriptions. And the Borrowdale yew- 
trees have inspired some of the poet's noblest lines — lines 
breathing all the strange forlornness of Glaramara's soli- 
tude, and the withering vault of shade. ^ 

The route from Rydal to Ullswater is still more thick- 
ly studded with poetic allusions. The Pass of Kirhstone 
is the theme of a characteristic ode; Grisdale Tarn and 



IV.] THE ENGLISH LAKES. 53 

Helvellyn recur again and again ; and Aira Force was one 
of the spots wliicli the poet best loved to describe, as well 
as to visit. It was on the shores of Farther Gowbarrow 
that the Daffodils danced beneath the trees. These refer- 
ences might be much further multiplied ; and the loving 
diligence of disciples has set before us " the Lake district 
as interpreted by AVordsworth" through a multitude of 
details. But enough has been said to show how com- 
pletely the poet had absorbed the influences of his dwell- 
ing-place ; how unique a representative he had become of 
the lovely district of his birth ; how he had made it 
subject to him by comprehending it, and his own by 
love. 

He visited other countries and described other scenes. 
Scotland, Wales, Switzerland, France, Germany, Italy, have 
all a place in his works. His familiarity with other sce- 
nery helped him, doubtless, to a better appreciation of the 
Lake country than he could have gained had he never left 
it. And, on the other hand, like Caesar in Gaul, or Wel- 
lington in the Peninsular, it was because he had so com- 
plete a grasp of this chosen base of operations that he was 
able to come, to see, and to make his own, so swiftly and 
unfailingly elsewhere. Happy are those whose deep-rooted 
memories cling like his about some stable home! whose 
notion of the world around them has expanded from some 
prospect of happy tranquillity, instead of being drawn at 
random from the confusing city's roar! Happier still if 
that early picture be of one of those rare scenes which 
have inspired poets and prophets with the retrospective 
day-dream of a patriarchal, or a golden age ; of some plot 
of ground like the Ithaca of Odysseus, Tpr]xe~i\ ciW ay ad)) 
KovpoTp6(l)og, " rough, but a nurse of men ;" of some life 
like that which a poet of kindred spirit to Wordsworth's 



54 WORDSWORTH. [chap. iv. 

saw half in vision, half in reality, among the husbandmen 
of the Italian hills : 

*' Peace, peace is theirs, and life no fraud that knows, 
Wealth as they will, and when they will, repose : 
On many a hill the happy homesteads stand, 
The living lakes through many a vale expand ; 
Cool glens are there, and shadowy caves divine, 
Deep sleep, and far-off voices of the kine — 
From moor to moor the exulting wild deer stray ; — 
The strenuous youth are strong and sound as they ; 
One reverence still the untainted race inspires, 
God their first thought, and after God their sires ; — 
These last discerned Astrasa's flying hem, 
And Virtue's latest footsteps walked with them." 



CHAPTER V. 

MARRIAGE. — SOCIETY. — HIGHLAND TOUR. 

With Wordswortli's settlement at Townend, Grasmere, in 
the closing days of tlie last century, the external events of 
his life may be said to come to an end. Even his mar- 
riage to Miss Mary Hutchinson, of Penrith, on October 4, 
1802, was not so much an importation into his existence 
of new emotion, as a development and intensification of 
feelings which had long been there. This marriage was 
the crowning stroke of Wordsworth's felicity — the poetic 
recompense for his steady advocacy of all simple and noble 
things. When he wished to illustrate the true dignity 
and delicacy of rustic lives he was always accustomed to 
refer to the Cumbrian folk. And now it seemed that 
Cumberland requited him for his praises with her choicest 
boon ; found for him in the country town of Penrith, and 
from the small and obscure circle of his connexions and 
acquaintance — nay, from the same dame's school in which 
he was taught to read — a wife such as neither rank nor 
young beauty nor glowing genius enabled his brother bards 
to win. 

Mrs. Wordsworth's poetic appreciativeness, manifest to 
all who knew her, is attested by the poet's assertion that 
two of the best lines in the poem of The Daffodils— 



56 WOEDSWORTH. [chap. 

*' They flash upon that inward eye 
Which is the bliss of solitude " — ■ 

were of her composition. And in all other matters, from 
the highest to the lowest, she was to him a true helpmate, 
a companion " dearer far than life and light are dear," 
and able " in his steep march to uphold him to the end." 
Devoted to her husband, she nevertheless welcomed not 
only without jealousy but with delight the household com- 
panionship through life of the sister who formed so large 
an element in his being. Admiring the poet's genius to 
the full, and following the workings of his mind with a 
sympathy that never tired, she nevertheless was able to 
discern, and with unobtrusive care to hide or avert, those 
errors of manner into which retirement and self-absorption 
will betray even the gentlest spirit. It speaks, perhaps, 
equally well for Wordsworth's character that this tendency 
to a lengthy insistence, in general conversation, on his own 
feelings and ideas is the worst charge that can be brought 
against him; and for Mrs. Wordsworth's, that her simple 
and rustic upbringing had gifted her with a manner so 
gracious and a tact so ready that in her presence all things 
could not but go well. 

The life which the young couple led was one of primi- 
tive simplicity. In some respects it was even less luxuri- 
ous than that of the peasants around them. They drank 
water, and ate the simplest fare. Miss Wordsworth had 
long rendered existence possible for her brother on the nar- 
rowest of means by her unselfish energy and skill in house- 
hold management; and "plain living and high thinking" 
were equally congenial to the new inmate of the frugal 
home. Wordsworth gardened ; and all together, or often- 
est the poet and his sister, wandered almost daily over the 
neighbouring hills. Narrow means did not prevent them 



v.] MARRIAGE. 57 

from ojffering a generous welcome to their few friends, 
especially Coleridge and his family, who repeatedly stayed 
for months under Wordsworth's roof. Miss Wordsworth's 
unpublished letters breathe the very spirit of hospitality 
in their naive details of the little sacrifices gladly made for 
the sake of the presence of these honoured guests. But 
for the most part their life was solitary and uneventful. 
Books they had few ; neighbours almost none ; and Miss 
AVordsworth's diary of these early years describes a life 
seldom paralleled in its intimate dependence on external 
nature. I take, almost at random, her account of a single 
day. "November 24, 1801. Read Chaucer. We walked 
by Gell's cottage. As we were going along we were stop- 
ped at once, at the distance, perhaps, of fifty yards from 
our favourite birch-tree ; it was yielding to the gust of 
wind, with all its tender twigs ; the sun shone upon it, and 
it glanced in the wind like a flying sunshiny shower. It 
was a tree in shape, with stem and branches ; but it was 
like a spirit of water. After our return William read 
Spenser to us, and then walked to John's Grove. Went 
to meet W." And from an unpublished letter of Miss 
Wordsworth's, of about the same period (September 10, 
1800), I extract her description of the new home. "We 
are daily more delighted with Grasmere and its neighbour- 
hood. Our walks are perpetually varied, and we are more 
fond of the mountains as our acquaintance with them in- 
creases. We have a boat upon the lake, and a small or- 
chard and smaller garden, which, as it is the work of our 
own hands, we regard with pride and partiality. Our cot- 
tage is quite large enough for us, though very small ; and 
we have made it neat and comfortable within doors; and 
it looks very nice on the outside ; for though the roses 
and honeysuckles which we have planted against it are 



58 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

only of this year's growth, yet it is covered all over with 
green leaves and scarlet flowers ; for we have trained scarlet 
beans upon threads, which are not only exceedingly beau- 
tiful but very useful, as their produce is immense. We 
have made a lodging-room of the parlour below stairs, 
which has a stone floor, therefore we have covered it all 
over with matting. We sit in a room above stairs, and 
we have one lodging-room with two single beds, a sort of 
lumber-room, and a small, low, unceiled room, which I have 
papered with newspapers, and in which we have put a small 
bed. Our servant is an old woman of sixty years of age, 
whom we took partly out of charity. She was very ignorant, 
very foolish, and very difficult to teach. But the goodness 
of her disposition, and the great convenience we should find 
if my perseverance was successful, induced me to go on." 

The sonnets entitled Personal Talk give a vivid picture 
of the blessings of such seclusion. There are many minds 
which will echo the exclamation with which the poet dis- 
misses his visitors and their gossip : 

"Better than such discourse doth silence long, 
Long barren silence, square with my desire ; 
To sit without emotion, hope, or aim, 
In the loved presence of my cottage fire, 
And listen to the flapping of the flame, 
Or kettle whispering its faint undersong." 

Many will look with envy on a life which has thus de- 
cisively cut itself loose from the world ; which is secure 
from the influx of those preoccupations, at once distract- 
ing and nugatory, which deaden the mind to all other 
stimulus, and split the river of life into channels so minute 
that it loses itself in the sand. 

" Hence have I genial seasons ; hence have I 
Smooth passions, smooth discourse, and joyous thought." 



v.] SOCIETY. 59 

Left to herself, the mind can expatiate in those kingdoms 
of the spirit bequeathed to us by past generations and dis- 
tant men, which to the idle are but a garden of idleness, 
but to those who choose it become a true possession and 
an ever-wideninof home. Amono; those " nobler loves and 
nobler cares "there is excitement without reaction, there 
is an unwearied and impersonal joy — a joy which can only 
be held cheap because it is so abundant, and can only dis- 
appoint us through our own incapacity to contain it. 
These delights of study and of solitude Wordsworth en- 
joyed to the full. In no other poet, perhaps, have the 
poet's heightened sensibilities been productive of a pleas- 
ure so unmixed with pain. The wind of his emotions 
blew right abaft ; he " swam smoothly in the stream of his 
nature, and lived but one man." 

The blessing of meditative and lonely hours must of 
course be purchased by corresponding limitations. Words- 
worth's conception of human character retained to the end 
an extreme simplicity. Many of life's most impressive 
phenomena were hid from his eyes. He never encounter- 
ed any of those rare figures whose aspect seems to justify 
all traditions of pomp and pre-eminence when they appear 
amid stately scenes as with a natural sovereignty. He 
neither achieved nor underwent any of those experiences 
which can make all high romance seem a part of memory, 
and bestow, as it were, a password and introduction into 
the very innermost of human fates. On the other hand, 
he almost wholly escaped those sufferings which exception- 
al natures must needs derive from too close a contact with 
this commonplace world. It was not his lot — as it has 
been the lot of so many poets — to move amongst mankind 
at once as an intimate and a stranger; to travel from dis- 
illusionment to disillusionment, and from regret to regret ; 



60 WOEDSWOKTH. [chap. 

to construct around him a world of ideal beings, -vvho 
crumble into dust at his touch ; to hope from them what 
they can neither understand nor accomplish, to lavish on 
them what they can never repay. Such pain, indeed, may 
become a discipline ; and the close contact with many lives 
may teach to the poetic nature lessons of courage, of self- 
suppression, of resolute good-will, and may transform into 
an added dignity the tumult of emotions which might else 
have run riot in his heart. Yet it is less often from moods 
of self-control than from moods of self-abandonment that 
the fount of poetry- springs ; and herein it was that Words- 
worth's especial felicity lay — that there was no one feeling 
in him which the world had either repressed or tainted ; 
that he had no joy which might not be the harmless joy 
of all ; and that, therefore, it was when he was most unre- 
servedly himself that he was most profoundly human. All 
that was needful for him was to strike down into the deep 
of his heart. Or, using his own words, we may compare 
his tranquil existence to 

" A cr3'stal river, 
Diaphanous because it travels slowly ;" 

and in which poetic thoughts rose unimpeded to the sur- 
face, like bubbles through the pellucid stream. 

The first hint of many of his briefer poems is to be 
found in his sister's diary : 

'■'■ April 15, 1802.- — When we were in the woods below Gowbarrow 
Park we saw a few daffodils close to the water side. As we went 
along there were more, and yet more ; and at last, under the boughs 
of the trees, we saw there was a long belt of them along the shore. 
I never saw daffodils so beautiful. They grew among the mossy 
stones about them ; some rested their heads on the stones as on a pil- 
low ; the rest tossed, and reeled, and danced, and seemed as if they 
verily danced with the wind, they looked so gay and glancing." 



v.] HIGHLAND TOUR. 61 

'•'■July 30, 1802. — Left London between five and six o'clock of the 
morning, outside the Dover coach. A beautiful morning. The city, 
St. Paul's, with the river, a multitude of little boats, made a beautiful 
sight as we crossed Westminster Bridge ; the houses not overhung by 
their clouds of smoke, were spread out endlessly ; yet the sun shone 
so brightly, with such a pure light, that there was something like the 
purity of one of nature's own grand spectacles. Arrived at Calais at 
four in the mctf-ning of July 31st. Delightful walks in the evenings, 
seeing far off in the west the coast of England like a cloud, crested 
with Dover Castle, the evening star, and the glory of the sky. The 
reflections in the water were more beautiful than the sky itself ; pur- 
ple waves brighter than precious stones for ever melting away upon 
the sands." 

How simple are the elements of these delights! There 
is nothing here, except fraternal affection, a sunrise, a sun- 
set, a flock of bright wild flowers ; and yet the sonnets on 
Westminster Bridge and Calais Sands, and the stanzas on 
the Daffodils, have taken their place among the permanent 
records of the profoundest human joy. 

Another tour — this time through Scotland — undertaken 
in August, 1803, inspired Wordsworth with several of his 
best pieces. Miss Wordsworth's diary of this tour has 
been lately published, and should be familiar to all lovers 
of nature. The sister's journal is, indeed, the best intro- 
duction to the brother's poems. It has not — it cannot have 
— their dignity and beauty; but it exemplifies the same 
method of regarding Nature, the same self-identification 
with her subtler aspects and entrance into her profounder 
charm. It is interesting to notice how the same impres- 
sion strikes both minds at once. From the sister's it is 
quickly reflected in^words of exquisite delicacy and sim- 
plicity ; in the brother's it germinates, and reappears, it 
may be months or years afterwards, as the nucleus of a 
mass of thought and feeling which has grown round it in 



62 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

his musing soul. Tlie travellers' encounter with two High- 
land girls on the shore of Loch Lomond is a good instance 
of this. " One of the girls," writes Miss Wordsworth, 
" was exceedingly beautiful ; and the figures of both of 
them, in grey plaids falling to their feet, their faces only 
being uncovered, excited our attention before we spoke to 
them ; but they answered us so sweetly that we were quite 
delighted, at the same time that they stared at us with an 
innocent look of wonder. I think I never heard the Eng- 
lish language sound more sweetly than from the mouth of 
the elder of these girls, while she stood at the gate answer- 
ing our inquiries, her face flushed with the rain ; her pro- 
nunciation was clear and distinct, without difficulty, yet 
slow, as if like a foreign speech." 

*' A face with gladness overspread ! ' 

Soft smiles, by human kindness bred ! 
And seemliness complete, that sways 
Thy courtesies, about thee plays ; 
With no restraint, but such as springs 
From quick and eager visitings 
Of thoughts that lie beyond the reach 
Of thy few words of English speech : 
A bondage sweetly brooked, a strife 
That gives thy gestures grace and life ! 
So have I, not unmoved in mind, 
Seen birds of tempest-loving kind 
Thus beating up against the wind." 

The travellers saw more of this girl, and Miss Words- 
worth's opinion was confirmed. But to Wordsworth his 
glimpse of her became a veritable romance. He commem- 
orated it in his poem of The Higliland Girl^ soon after 
his return from Scotland ; he narrated it once more in his 
poem of The Three Cottage Girls, written nearly twenty 



v.] HIGHLAND TOUR. 63 

years afterwards ; and " the sort of prophecy," he says in 
1843, " with which the verses conclude has, through God's 
goodness, been realized; and now, approaching the close 
of my seventy-third year, I have a most vivid remembrance 
of her and the beautiful objects with which she was sur- 
rounded." Nay, more; he has elsewhere informed us, 
with some naivete, that the first few lines of his exquisite 
poem to his wife, She ivas a phantom of delight, were 
originally composed as a description of this Highland 
maid, who would seem almost to have formed for him ever 
afterwards a kind of type and image of loveliness. 

That such a meeting as this should have formed so 
long-remembered an incident in the poet's life will appear, 
perhaps, equally ridiculous to the philosopher and to the 
man of the world. The one would have given less, the 
other would have demanded more. And yet the quest of 
beauty, like the quest of truth, reaps its surest reward 
when it is disinterested as well as keen ; and the true lover 
of humankind will often draw his most exquisite moments 
from what to most men seems but the shadow of a joy. 
Especially, as in this case, his heart will be prodigal of the 
impulses of that protecting tenderness which it is the bless- 
ing of early girlhood to draw forth unwittingly, and to 
enjoy unknown — affections which lead to no declaration, 
and desire no return ; which are the spontaneous effluence 
of the very Spirit of Love in man ; and which play and 
hover around winning innocence like the coruscations 
round the head of the unconscious lulus, a soft and un- 
consuming flame. 

It was well, perhaps, that Wordsworth's romance should 
come to him in this remote and fleeting fashion. For to 
the Priest of Nature it was fitting that all things else 
should be harmonious, indeed, but accessory ; that joy 



64 WORDSWORTH. [chap. v. 

should not be so keen, nor sorrow so desolating, nor love 
itself so wildly strong, as to prevent him from going out 
upon the mountains with a heart at peace, and receiving 
" in a wise passiveness " the voices of earth and heaven. 



CHAPTER VI. 

SIR GEORGE BEAUMONT. DEATH OF JOHN WORDSWORTH. 

The year 1803 saw the beginning of a friendship which 
formed a vahiable element in Wordsworth's hfe. Sir 
George Beaumont, of Coleorton Hall, Essex, a descendant 
of the dramatist, and representative of a family long dis- 
tinguished for talent and culture, was staying with Cole- 
ridge at Greta Hall, Keswick, when, hearing of Coleridge's 
affection for Wordsworth, he was struck with the wish to 
bring Wordsworth also to Keswick, and bought and pre- 
sented to him a beautiful piece of land at Applethwaite, 
under Skiddaw, in the hope that he might be induced 
to settle there. Coleridge was soon afterwards obliged 
to leave England in search of health, and the plan fell 
through. A characteristic letter of Wordsworth's records 
his feelings on the occasion. "Dear Sir George," he 
writes, " if any person were to be informed of the particu- 
lars of your kindness to me — if it were described to him in 
all its delicacy and nobleness— and he should afterwards be 
told that I suffered eight weeks to elapse without writing to 
you one word of thanks or acknowledgment, he would deem 
it a tiling absolutely imiJossihle. It is nevertheless true. 

" Owing to a set of painful and uneasy sensations which 
I have, more or less, at all times about my chest, I deferred 
writing to you, being at first made still more uncomforta- 



66 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

ble by travelling, and loathing to do violence to myself in 
what ought to be an act of pure pleasure and enjoyment, 
viz., the expression of my deep sense of your goodness. 
This feeling was indeed so strong in me as to make me 
look upon the act of writing to you as a thing not to be 
done but in my best, my purest, and my happiest mo- 
ments. Many of these I had, but then I had not my pen, 
ink, and paper before me, my conveniences, ' my appli- 
ances and means to boot;' all which, the moment that I 
thought of them, seemed to disturb and impair the sancti- 
ty of my pleasure. I contented myself with thinking over 
my complacent feelings, and breathing forth solitary grat- 
ulations and thanksgivings, which I did in many a sweet 
and many a wild place, during my late tour." 

The friendship of which this act of delicate generosity 
was the beginning was maintained till Sir George Beau- 
mont's death in 1827, and formed for many years Words- 
worth's closest link with the world of art and culture. Sir 
George was himself a painter as well as a connoisseur, and 
his landscapes are not without indications of the strong 
feeling for nature which he undoubtedly possessed. 
Wordsworth, who had seen very few pictures, but was a 
penetrating critic of those which he knew, discerned this 
vein of true feeling in his friend's work, and has idealized 
a small landscape which Sir George had given him, in a 
sonnet which reproduces the sense of happy pause and 
voluntary fixation with which the mind throws itself into 
some scene where art has given 

" To one brief moment caught from fleeting time 
The appropriate cahn of blest eternity." 

There was another pursuit in which Sir George Beau- 
mont was much interested, and in which painter and poet 



VI.] SIR GEORGE BEAUMONT. 67 

were well fitted to unite. The landscape-gardener, as 
Wordsworth says, should " work in the spirit of Nature, 
with an invisible hand of art." And he shows how any 
real success can only be achieved when the designer is 
willing to incorporate himself with the scenery around 
hira ; to postpone to its indications the promptings of his 
own pride or caprice ; to interpret Nature to herself by 
completing touches ; to correct her with deference, and, as 
it were, to caress her without importunity. And rising to 
that aspect of the question which connects it with human 
society, he is strenuous in condemnation of that taste, not 
so much for solitude as for isolation, which can tolerate 
no neighbourhood, and finds its only enjoyment in the 
sense of monopoly. 

" Laying out grounds, as it is called, may be considered as a liberal 
art, in some sort like poetry and painting ; its object ought to be to 
move the affections under the control of good-sense ; and surely the 
affections of those who have the deepest perception of the beauty of 
Nature — who have the most valuable feelings, that is, the most per- 
manent, the most independent, the most ennobling, connected with 
Nature and human life. No liberal art aims merely at the gratifica- 
tion of an individual or a class ; the painter or poet is degraded in 
proportion as he does so. The true servants of the arts pay hom- 
age to the human-kind as impersonated in unwarped and enlightened 
minds. If this be so when we are merely putting together words 
or colours, how much more ought the feeling to prevail when we are 
in the midst of the realities of things ; of the beauty and harmony, 
of the joy and happiness, of loving creatures ; of men and children, 
of birds and beasts, of hills and streams, and trees and flowers ; with 
the changes of night and day, evening and morning, summer and 
winter ; and all their unwearied actions and energies, as benign in 
the spirit that animates them as they are beautiful and grand in 
that form of clothing which is given to them for the delight of our 
senses ! What, then, shall we say of many great mansions, with 
their unqualified expulsion of human creatures from their neigh- 
4 



68 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

bourhood, happy or not ; houses which do what is fabled of the 
upas-tree — breathe out death and desolation ! For my part, strip my 
neighbourhood of human beings, and I should think it one of the 
greatest privations I could undergo. You have all the poverty of 
sohtude, nothing of its elevation." 

This passage is from a letter of AVordsworth's to Sir 
George Beaumont, who was engaged at the time in re- 
building and laying out Coleorton. The poet himself 
planned and superintended some of these improvements, 
and wrote, for various points of interest in the grounds, 
inscriptions which form dignified examples of that kind 
of composition. 

Nor was Sir George Beaumont the only friend whom 
the poet's taste assisted in the choice of a site or the dis- 
position of pleasure-grounds. More than one seat in the 
Lake country — among them one home of pre-eminent 
beauty — have owed to Wordsworth no small part of their 
ordered charm. In this way, too, the poet is with us still : 
his presence has a strange reality as we look on some 
majestic prospect of interwinding lake and mountain 
which his design has made more beautifully visible to the 
children's children of those he loved; as we stand, per- 
haps, in some shadowed garden-ground where his will has 
had its way — has framed Helvellyn's far-off summit in an 
arch of tossing green, and embayed in towering forest- 
trees the long lawns of a silent valley — fit haunt for lofty 
aspiration and for brooding calm. 

But of all woodland ways which Wordsworth's skill 
designed or his feet frequented, not one was dearer to him 
(if I may pass thus by a gentle transition to another of 
the strong affections of his life) than a narrow path 
through a firwood near his cottage, which " was known 
to the poet's household by the name of John's Grove." 



Ti.] THE WORDSWORTH BROTHERS. 69 

For in the year 1800 bis brother, John Wordsworth, a 
few years younger than himself, and captain of an East 
Indiaman, had spent eight months in the poet's cottage at 
Grasmere. The two brothers had seen little of each other 
since childhood, and the poet had now the delight of dis- 
coverinc: in the sailor a character cono-enial to his own, and 
an appreciation of poetry — and of the Lyrical Ballads 
especially — which was intense and delicate in an unusual 
degree. In both brothers, too, there was the same love 
of nature ; and after John's departure, the poet pleased 
himself with imagining the visions of Grasmere which 
beguiled the watches of many a night at sea, or with trac- 
ing the pathway which the sailor's instinct had planned 
and trodden amid trees so thickly planted as to baffle a 
less practised skill. John Wordsworth, on the other hand, 
looked forward to Grasmere as the final goal of his wan- 
derings, and intended to use his own savings to set the 
poet free from worldly cares. 

Two more voyages the sailor made with such hopes as 
these, and amid a frequent interchange of books and 
letters with his brother at home. Then, in February, 
1805, he set sail from Portsmouth, in command of the 
"Abergavenny" East Indiaman, bound for India and 
China. Through the incompetence of the pilot who was 
taking her out of the Channel, the ship struck on the 
Shambles off the Bill of Portland, on February 5, 1805. 
" She struck," says Wordsworth, " at 5 p.m. Guns were 
fired immediately, and w^ere continued to be fired. She 
was gotten off the rock at half-past seven, but had taken 
in so much water, in spite of constant pumping, as to be 
water-logged. They had, however, hope that she might 
still be run upon Weymouth sands, and with this view 
continued pumping and baling till eleven, when she went 



'70 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

down. ... A few minutes before the ship went down ray- 
brother was seen talking to the first mate with apparent 
cheerf uhiess ; and he was standing on the hen-coop, which 
is the point from which he could overlook the whole ship, 
the moment she went down — dying, as he had lived, in the 
very place and point where his duty stationed him." 

" For myself," he continues elsewhere, " I feel that there 
is something cut out of my life which cannot be restored. 
I never thought of him but with hope and delight. We 
looked forward to the time, not distant, as we thought, 
when he would settle near us — when the task of his life 
would be over, and he would have nothing to do but reap 
his reward. By that time I hoped also that the chief part 
of my labours would be executed, and that I should be 
able to show him that he had not placed a false confidence 
in me. I never wrote a line without a thought of giving 
him pleasure ; my writings, printed and manuscript, were 
his delight, and one of the chief solaces of his long voy- 
ages. But let me stop. I will not be cast down ; were 
it only for his sake, I will not be dejected. I have much 
yet to do, and pray God to give me strength and power ; 
his part of the agreement between us is brought to an end, 
mine continues ; and I hope, when I shall be able to think 
of him with a calmer mind, that the remembrance of him 
dead will even animate me more than the joy which I had 
in him living." 

In these and the following reflections there is nothing of 
novelty ; yet there is an interest in the spectacle of this 
strong and simple mind confronted with the universal 
problems, and taking refuge in the thoughts which have 
satisfied, or scarcely satisfied, so many generations of 
mourning men. 

"A thousand times have I asked myself, as your tender 



VI.] DEATH OF JOHN WORDSWORTH. 11 

sympathy led me to do, 'Why was he taken away?' and I 
have answered the question as you have done. In fact, 
there is no other answer which can satisfy, and lay the 
mind at rest. Why have we a choice, and a will, and a 
notion of justice and injustice, enabling us to be moral 
ao'cnts? Why have we sympathies that make the best of 
us so afraid of inflicting pain and sorrow, which yet we see 
dealt about so lavishly by the Supreme Governor? Why 
should our notions of right towards each other, and to all 
sentient beings within our influence, differ so widely from 
what appears to be his notion and rule, if everything ivere 
to end here ? Would it not be blasphemy to say that, upon 
the supposition of the thinking principle being destroyed 
hy death, however inferior we may be to the great Cause 
and Ruler of things, we have more of love in our nature 
than he has ? The thought is monstrous ; and yet how to 
get rid of it, except upon the supposition of another and a 
better world, I do not see." 

From this calamity, as from all the lessons of life, Words- 
worth drew all the benefit which it was empowered to 
bring. "A deep distress hath humanized my soul " — what 
lover of poetry does not know the pathetic lines in which 
he bears witness to the teaching of sorrow ? Other griefs, 
too, he had— the loss of two children in 1812 ; his sister's 
chronic illness, beginning in 1832 ; his daughter's death in 
1847, All these he felt to the full; and yet, until his 
daughter's death, which was more than his failing energies 
could bear, these bereavements were but the thinly-scatter- 
ed clouds " in a great sea of blue "—seasons of mourning 
here and there among years which never lost their hold on 
peace ; which knew no shame and no remorse, no desola- 
tion and no fear ; whose days were never long with weari- 
ness, nor their nights broken at the touch of woe. Even 



72 WORDSWOKTII. [chap. 

when we speak of his tribulations, it is his happiness which 
rises in our minds. 

And inasmuch as this f ehcity is the great fact of Words- 
worth's life — since his history is for the most part but the 
history of a halcyon calm — we find ourselves forced upon the 
question whether such a life is to be held desirable or no. 
Happiness with honor was the ideal of Solon ; is it also 
oars? To the modern spirit — to the Christian, in whose 
ears counsels of perfection have left " a presence that is not 
to be put by," this question, at which a Greek would have 
smiled, is of no such easy solution. 

To us, perhaps, in computing the fortune of any one 
whom we hold dear, it may seem more needful to inquire 
not whether he has had enough of joy, but whether he has 
had enough of sorrow ; whether the blows of circumstance 
have wholly shaped his character from the rock ; whether 
his soul has taken lustre and purity in the refiner's fire. 
Nor is it only (as some might s:;y) for violent and faulty 
natures that sorrow is the best. It is true that by sorrow 
only can the headstrong and presumptuous spirit be shamed 
into gentleness and solemnized into humility. But sorrow 
is used also by the Power above us in cases where we men 
would have shrunk in horror from so rough a touch. 
Natures that were already of a heroic unselfishness, of a 
childlike purity, have been raised ere now by anguish upon 
anguish, woe after woe, to a height of holiness which we 
may believe that they could have reached by no other road. 
Why should it not be so ? since there is no limit to the 
soul's possible elevation, why should her purifying trials 
have any assignable end? She is of a metal which can 
grow for ever brighter in the fiercening flame. And if, 
then, we would still pronounce the true Beatitudes not on 
the rejoicing, the satisfied, the highly-honoured, but after 



VI.] DEATH OF JOHN WORDSWORTH. 73 

an ancient and sterner pattern, what account are we to give 
of Wordsworth's long years of blissful calm ? 

In the first place, we may say that his happiness was as 
wholly free from vulgar or transitory elements as a man's 
can be. It lay in a life which most men would have found 
austere and blank indeed ; a life from which not Croesus 
only but Solon would have turned in scorn ; a life of pov- 
erty and retirement, of long apparent failure, and honour 
that came tardily at the close ; it was a happiness nour- 
ished on no sacrifice of other men, on no eager appropria- 
tion of the goods of earth, but springing from a single eye 
and a loving spirit, and wrought from those primary emo- 
tions which are the innocent birthright of all. And if it 
be answered that, however truly philosophic, however sacred- 
ly pure, his happiness may have been, yet its wisdom and 
its holiness were without an effort, and that it is effort 
which makes the philosopher and the saint : then we must 
use in answer his own Platonic scheme of things, to express 
a thought which we can but dimly apprehend; and we 
must say that, though progress be inevitably linked in our 
minds with struggle, yet neither do we conceive of strug- 
gle as without a pause ; there must be prospect-places in 
the long ascent of souls ; and the whole of this earthly life 
— this one existence, standing we know not where among 
the myriad that have been for us or shall be — may not be 
too much to occupy with one of those outlooks of vision 
and of prophecy, when 

" In a season of calm weather, 
Though inland far we be, 
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea 
Which brought us hither ; 
Can in a moment travel thither, 
And see the children sport upon the shore, 
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore." 



CHAPTER yil. 

" HAPPY WARRIOR," AND PATRIOTIC POEMS. 

The year 1805, whicli bereft Wordswortli of a beloved 
brother, brought with it also another death, which was felt 
by the whole English nation like a private calamity. The 
emotion which Wordsworth felt at the news of Trafalccar 
— the way in which he managed to intertwine the memories 
of Nelson and of his own brother in his heart — may re- 
mind us fitly at this point of our story of the distress and 
perplexity of nations which for so many years surrounded 
the quiet Grasmere home, and of the strong responsive 
emotion with which the poet met each shock of European 
fates. 

When England first took up arms against the French 
revolution, Wordsworth's feeling, as we have seen, had 
been one of unmixed sorrow and shame. Bloody and 
terrible as the revolution had become, it was still in some 
sort representative of human freedom ; at any rate, it 
might still seem to contain possibilities of progress such 
as the retrograde despotisms with which England allied 
herself could never know. But the conditions of the con- 
test changed before long. France had not the wisdom, 
the courage, the constancy to play to the end the part for 
which she had seemed chosen among the nations. It was 
her conduct towards Switzerland which decisively altered 



CHAP. Til.] "HAPPY WAKRIOPv," AND PATRIOTIC POEMS. 16 

Wordsworth's view. lie saw lier valiant spirit of self- 
defence corrupted into lust of glory ; lier eagerness for the 
abolition of unjust privilege turned into a contentment 
with equality of degradation under a despot's heel. " One 
man, of men the meanest too "—for such the First Consul 
must needs appear to the moralist's eye— was 

" Raised up to sway the world — to do, undo ; 
With mighty nations for his underlings." 

And history herself seemed vulgarized by the repetition of 
her ancient tales of war and overthrow on a scale of such 
apparent magnitude, but with no glamour of distance to 
hide the baseness of the agencies by which the destinies 
of Europe were shaped anew. This was an occasion that 
tried the hearts of men ; it was not easy to remain through 
all those years at once undazzled and untempted, and never 
in the blackest hour to despair of human virtue. 

In his tract on The Convention of Cintra, 1808, Words- 
worth has given the fullest expression to this undaunted 
temper : 

" Oppression, its own blind and predestined enemy, has poured this 
of blessedness upon Spain— that the enormity of the outrages of 
which she has been the victim has created an object of love and of 
hatred, of apprehensions and of wishes, adequate (if that be possible) 
to the utmost demands of the human spirit. The heart that serves 
in this cause, if it languish, must languish from its own constitutional 
weakness, and not through want of nourishment from without. But 
it is a belief propagated in books, and which passes currently among 
talking men as part of their familiar wisdom, that the hearts of the 
many are constitutionally weak, that they do languish, and are slow 
to answer to the requisitions of things. I entreat those who are in 
this delusion to look behind them and about them for the evidence 
of experience. Now this, rightly understood, not only gives no sup- 
port to any such belief, but proves that the truth is in direct opposi- 
4* 



76 WOKDSWORTH. [chap. 

tion to it. The history of all ages — tumults after tumults, wars for- 
eign or civil, with short or with no breathing-places from generation 
to generation ; the senseless weaving and interweaving of factions, 
vanishing, and reviving, and piercing each other like the Northern 
Lights ; public commotions, and those in the breast of the individual ; 
the long calenture to which the Lover is subject ; the blast, like the 
blast of the desert, which sweeps perennially through a frightful sol- 
itude of its own making in the mind of the Gamester ; the slowly 
quickening, but ever quickening, descent of appetite down which the 
Miser is propelled ; the agony and cleaving oppression of grief ; the 
ghost-like hauntings of shame ; the incubus of revenge ; the life-dis- 
temper of ambition . . . these demonstrate incontestably that the 
passions of men (I mean the soul of sensibility in the heart of man), 
in all quarrels, in all contests, in all quests, in all delights, in all 
employments which are either sought by men or thrust upon them, 
do immeasurably transcend their objects. The true sorrow of human- 
ity consists in this — not that the mind of man fails, but that the 
cause and demands of action and of life so rarely correspond with the 
dignity and intensity of human desires ; and hence, that which is slow 
to languish is too easily turned aside and abused. But, with the re- 
membrance of what has been done, and in the face of the intermi- 
nable evils which are threatened, a Spaniard can never have cause to 
complain of this while a follower of the tyrant remains in arms upon 
the Peninsula." 

It was passages sucli as tliis, perhaps, wliicli led Can- 
ning to declare tliat Wordsworth's pamphlet was the finest 
piece of political eloquence which had appeared since 
Burke. And yet if we compare it with Burke, or with 
the great Greek exemplar of all those who would give 
speech the cogency of act — we see at once the causes of 
its practical failure. In Demosthenes the thoughts and 
principles are often as lofty as any patriot can express; 
but their loftiness, in his speech, as in the very truth of 
things, seemed but to add to their immediate reality. 
They were beaten and inwoven into the facts of the hour ; 
action seemed to turn on them as on its only possible 



yii.] " HAPPY WARRIOR," AND PATRIOTIC POEMS. 11 

pivot ; it was as tliougli Virtue and Freedom hung armed 
in heaven above the assembly, and in the visible likeness 
of immortal ancestors beckoned upon an urgent way. 
Wordsworth's mood of mind, on the other hand, as he has 
depicted it in two sonnets written at the same time as his 
tract, explains why it was that that appeal was rather a 
solemn protest than an effective exhortation. In the first 
sonnet he describes the surroundings of his task — the dark 
wood and rocky cave, "the hollow vale which foaming 
torrents fill with omnipresent murmur :" 

" Here mighty Nature ! in this school sublime 
I weigh the hopes and fears of suffering Spain ; 
For her consult the auguries of time. 
And through the human heart explore my way, 
And look and listen, gathering whence I may 
Triumph, and thoughts no bondage can restrain." 

And then he proceeds to conjecture what effect his tract 
will produce : 

" I dropped my pen, and listened to the wind, 

That sang of trees uptorn and vessels tost ; 

A midnight harmony, and wholly lost 
To the general sense of men, by chains confined 
Of business, care, or pleasure, — or resigned 

To timely sleep. Thought I, the impassioned strain 

Which without aid of numbers I sustain 
Like acceptation from the world will find." 

This deliberate and lonely emotion was fitter to inspire 
grave poetry than a pamphlet appealing to an immediate 
crisis. And the sonnets dedicated To Liberty (1802-16) 
are the outcome of many moods like these. 

It is little to say of these sonnets that they are the most 
permanent record in our literature of the Napoleonic war. 



18 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

For that distinction they have few competitors. Two 
magnificent songs of Campbell's, an ode of Coleridge's, a 
few spirited stanzas of Byron's — strangely enough there 
is little besides these that lives in the national memory, 
till we come to the ode which summed up the long con- 
test a generation later, when its great captain passed away. 
But these Sonnets to Liberty are worthy of comparison 
with the noblest passages of patriotic verse or prose which 
all our history has inspired — the passages where Shak- 
speare brings his rays to focus on " this earth, this realm, 
this England" — or where the dread of national dishon- 
our has kindled Chatham to an iron glow — or where 
Milton rises from the polemic into the prophet, and 
Burke from the partisan into the philosopher. The ar- 
moury of Wordsworth, indeed, was not forged with the 
same fire as that of these " invincible knights of old." 
He had not swayed senates, nor directed policies, nor 
gathered into one ardent bosom all the spirit of a heroic 
age. But he had deeply felt what it is that makes the 
greatness of nations ; in that extremity no man was more 
staunch than he ; no man more unwaveringly disdained 
unrighteous empire, or kept the might of moral forces 
more steadfastly in view. Not Stein could place a man- 
lier reliance on " a few strong instincts and a few plain 
rules ;" not Fichte could invoke more convincingly the 
"great allies" which work with "Man's unconquerable 
mind." 

Here and there, indeed, throughout these sonnets are 
scattered strokes of high poetic admiration or scorn which 
could hardly be overmatched in -^schylus. Such is the 
indignant correction — 

*' Call not the royal Swede unfortunate, 
Who never did to Fortune bend the knee !" • 



til] " HAPPY WARKIOR," AND PATRIOTIC POEMS. 79 

or the stern touch which closes a description of Flami- 
ninus's proclamation at the Isthmian games, according lib- 
erty to Greece — 

" A gift of that which is not to be given 
By all the blended powers of Earth and Heaven !" 

Space forbids me to dwell in detail on these noble 
poems — on the well-known sonnets to Venice, to Milton, 
&c. ; on the generous tributes to the heroes of the con- 
test — Schill, Hoffer, Toussaint, Palafox ; or on the series 
which contrast the instinctive greatness of the Spanish 
people at bay with Napoleon's lying promises and inhu- 
man pride. But if Napoleon's career afforded to Words- 
worth a poetic example, impressive as that of Xerxes to 
the Greeks, of lawless and intoxicated power, there was 
need of some contrasted figure more notable than Hoffer 
or Palafox from which to draw the lessons which great 
contests can teach of unselfish valour. Was there then 
any man, by land or sea, who might serve as the poet's 
type of the ideal hero ? To an Englishman, at least, this 
question carries its own reply. For by a singular destiny 
England, with a thousand years of noble history behind 
her, has chosen for her best-beloved, for her national hero, 
not an Arminius from the age of legend, not a Henri 
Quatre from the age of chivalry, but a man whom men 
still living have seen and known. For, indeed, England 
and all the world as to this man were of one accord ; and 
when in victory, on his ship Victory^ Nelson passed away, 
the thrill which shook mankind was of a nature such as 
perhaps was never felt at any other death — so unanimous 
was the feeling of friends and foes that earth had lost her 
crowning example of impassioned self-devotedness and of 
heroic honour. 



80 ■ WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

And yet it might have seemed that between Nelson's 
natm'e and Wordsworth's there was little in common. 
The obvious limitations of the great Admiral's culture and 
character were likely to be strongly felt by the philosophic 
poet. And a serious crime, of which Nelson was com- 
monly,- though, as now appears, erroneously,^ supposed to 
be guilty, was sure to be judged by Wordsworth with 
great severity. 

AVordsworth was, in fact, hampered by some such feel- 
ings of disapproval. He even tells us, with that naive 
affectionateness which often makes us smile, that he has 
had recourse to the character of his own brother John 
for the qualities in which the great Admiral appeared to 
him to have been deficient. But on these hesitations it 
would be unjust to dwell. I mention them only to bring 
out the fact that between these two men, so different in 
outward fates — between "the adored, the incomparable 
Nelson" and the homely poet, " retired as noontide dew" 
— there was a moral likeness so profound that the ideal 
of the recluse was realized in the public life of the hero, 
and, on the other hand, the hero himself is only seen as 
completely heroic when his impetuous life stands out for 
us from the solemn background of the poet's calm. And 
surely these two natures taken together make the perfect 
Englishman. Nor is there any portrait fitter than that 
of The Hapi^y Warrior to go forth to all lands as repre- 
senting the English character at its height — a figure not 
ill-matching with " Plutarch's men." 

For indeed this short poem is in itself a manual of 
greatness; there is a Roman majesty in its simple and 

' The researches of Sir Nicholas Nicolas {Letters and Despatches of 
Lord Nelson^ vol. vii., Appendix) have placed Lord Nelson's connex- 
ion with Lady Hamilton in an unexpected light. 



VII.] "HAPPY WARRIOR," AND PATRIOTIC POEMS. 81 

weighty speech. And what eulogy was ever nobler than 
that passage where, without definite allusion or quoted 
name, the poet depicts, as it were, the very summit of 
glory in the well-remembered aspect of the Admiral in 
his last and greatest hour ? 

" Whose powers shed round him, in the common strife, 
Or mild concerns of ordinary life, 
A constant influence, a peculiar grace ; 
But who, if he be called upon to face 
Some awful moment to which Heaven has joined 
Great issues, good or bad for human kind. 
Is hap2yy as a Lover ^ and attired 
With sicdden brightness^ like a Man inspired.'''' 

Or again, where the hidden thought of Nelson's womanly 
tenderness, of his constant craving for the green earth and 
home affections in the midst of storm and war, melts the 
stern verses into a sudden change of tone : 

" He who, though thus endued as with a sense 
And faculty for storm and turbulence. 
Is yet a Soid whose master-bias leans 
To home-felt pleasures and to gentle scenes ; 
Sweet images ! which, wheresoe'er he be, 
Are at his heart ; and such fidelity 
It is his darling passion to approve ; — 
More brave for this, that he hath much to love." 

Compare with this the end of the Song at Brougham 
Castle, where, at the words " alas ! the fervent harper did 
not know — " the strain changes from the very spirit of 
chivalry to the gentleness of nature's calm. Nothing- 
can be more characteristic of Wordsworth than contrasts 
like this. They teach us to remember that his accustomed 
mildness is the fruit of no indolent or sentimental peace ; 
and that, on the other hand, when his counsels are sternest. 



82 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

and *' his voice is still for war," this is no voice of hard- 
ness or of vainglory, but the reluctant resolution of a heart 
which fain would yield itself to other energies, and have 
no message but of love. 

There is one more point in which the character of Nel- 
son has fallen in with one of the lessons which Words- 
worth is never tired of enforcing, the lesson that virtue 
grows by the strenuousness of its exercise, that it gains 
strength as it wrestles with pain and difficulty, and con- 
verts the shocks of circumstance into an energy of its 
proper glow. The Happy Warrior is one, 

" Who, doomed to go in company with Pain, 
And Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train ! 
Turns his necessity to glorious gain ; 
In face of these doth exercise a power 
Which is our human nature's highest dower ; 
Controls them and subdues, transmutes, bereaves 
Of their bad influence, and their good receives ; 
By objects which might force the soul to abate 
Her feeling, rendered more compassionate ;" 

and so further, in words which recall the womanly ten- 
derness, the almost exaggerated feeling for others' pain, 
which showed itself memorably in face of the blazing 
Orient^ and in the harbour at Teneriffe, and in the cock- 
pit at Trafalgar. 

In such lessons as these — such lessons as The Happy 
Warrior or the Patriotic Sonnets teach — there is, of course, 
little that is absolutely novel. We were already aware 
that the ideal hero should be as gentle as he is brave, that 
he should act always from the highest motives, nor greatly 
care for any reward save the consciousness of having done 
his duty. AVe were aware that the true strength of a na- 
tion is moral, and not material ; that dominion which rests 



yii.] "IIAPry WARRIOR," AND PATRIOTIC POEMS. 83 

on mere military force is destined quickly to decay ; that 
the tyrant, however admired and prosperous, is in reality 
despicable, and miserable, and alone ; that the true man 
should face death itself rather than parley with dishon- 
our. These truths are admitted in all ages ; yet it is scarce- 
ly stretching language to say that they are known to but 
few men. Or at least, though in a great nation there be 
many who will act on them instinctively, and approve 
them by a self-surrendering faith, there are few who can 
so put them forth in speech as to bring them home with 
a fresh conviction and an added glow ; who can sum up, 
like JEschylus, the contrast between Hellenic freedom and 
barbarian despotism in "one trump's peal that set all 
Greeks aflame ;" can thrill, like Virgil, a world-wide em- 
pire with the recital of the august simplicities of early 
Rome. 

To those who would know these things with a vital 
knowledge — a conviction which would remain unshaken 
were the whole world in arms for wrong — it is before all 
things necessary to strengthen the inner monitions by the 
companionship of these noble souls. And if a poet, by 
strong concentration of thought, by striving in all things 
along the upward way, can leave us in a few pages, as it 
were, a summary of patriotism, a manual of national hon- 
our, he surely has his place among his country's benefac- 
tors not only by that kind of courtesy which the nation 
extends to men of letters of whom her masses take little 
heed, but with a title as assured as any warrior or states- 
man, and with no less direct a claim. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

CHILDREN. LIFE AT RYDAL MOUNT. 

It may be well at this point to return to the quiet 
chronicle of the poet's life at Grasmere; where his cot- 
tage was becoming too small for an increasing family. 
His eldest son, John, was born in 1803 ; his eldest daugh- 
ter, Dorothy or Dora, in 1804. Then came Thomas, born 
1806; and Catherine, born 1808; and the list is ended 
by William, born 1810, and now (1880) the only survivor. 
In the spring of 1808 Wordsworth left Townend for Al- 
lan Bank — a more roomy but an uncomfortable house, 
at the north end of Grasmere. From thence he removed 
for a time, in 1811, to the Parsonage at Grasmere. 

Wordsworth was the most affectionate of fathers, and 
allusions to his children occur frequently in his poetry. 
Dora — who was the delight of his later years — has been 
described at length in The Triad. Shorter and simpler, 
but more completely successful, is the picture of Cathe- 
rine in the little poem which begins " Loving she is, and 
tractable, though wild," with its homely simile for child- 
hood — its own existence sufficient to fill it with gladness : 

" As a faggot sparkles on the hearth 
Not less if unattended and alone 
Than when both young and old sit gathered round 
And take delight in its activity." 



CHAP. VIII.] CHILDREN. 85 

The next notice of tliis beloved child is in the sonnet, 
" Surprised by joy, impatient as the wind," v^ritten when 
she had already been removed from his side. She died 
in 1812, and was closely followed by her brother Thomas. 
Wordsworth's grief for these children was profound, vio- 
lent, and lasting, to an extent which those who imagine 
him as not only calm but passionless might have some 
difficulty in believing. " Referring once," says his friend 
Mr. Aubrey de Vere, " to two young children of his who 
had died about forty years previously, he described the 
details of their illnesses with an exactness and an impetu- 
osity of troubled excitement such as might have been 
expected if the bereavement had taken place but a few 
weeks before. The lapse of time seemed to have left the 
sorrow submerged indeed, but still in all its first freshness. 
Yet I afterwards heard that at. the time of the illness, at 
least in the case of one of the two children, it was im- 
possible to rouse his attention to the danger. He chanced 
to be then under the immediate spell of one of those fits 
of poetic inspiration which descended on him like a cloud. 
Till the cloud had drifted, he could see nothing beyond." 

This anecdote illustrates the fact, ..which to those who 
knew Wordsworth well was sufficiently obvious, that the 
characteristic calm of his writings was the result of no 
coldness of temperament, but of a deliberate philosophy. 
The pregnant force of his language in dealing Avith those 
dearest to him — his wife, his sister, his brother — is proof 
enough of this. The frequent allusions in his correspond- 
ence to the physical exhaustion brought on by the act 
of poetical composition indicate a frame which, though 
made robust by exercise and temperance, was by nature 
excitable rather than strong. And even in the direction 
in which we should least have expected it, there is reason 



86 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

to believe that there were capacities of feeling in him 
which never broke from his control. " Had I been a 
writer of love-poetry," he is reported to have said, " it 
would have been natural to me to write it with a degree 
of warmth which could hardly have been approved by 
my principles, and which might have been undesirable 
for the reader." 

Wordsworth's paternal feelings, at any rate, were, as 
has been said, exceptionally strong ; and the impossibility 
of remaining in a house filled with sorrowful memories 
rendered him doubly anxious to obtain a permanent home. 
"The house which I have for some time occupied," he 
writes to Lord Lonsdale, in January, 1813, " is the Parson- 
age of Grasmere. It stands close by the churchyard, and 
I have found it absolutely necessary that we should quit a 
place which, by recalling to our minds at every moment 
the losses we have sustained in the course of the last year, 
would grievously retard our progress towards that tran- 
quillity which it is our duty to aim at." It happened that 
Rydal Mount became vacant at this moment, and in the 
spring of 1813 the AVordsworths migrated to this their 
favourite and last abode. 

Rydal Mount has probably been oftener described than 
any other English poet's home since Shakspeare ; and few 
homes, certainly, have been moulded into such close ac- 
cordance with their inmates' nature. The house, which 
has been altered since Wordsworth's day, stands, looking 
southward, on the rocky side of Nab Scar, above Rydal 
Lake. The garden was described by Bishop Wordsworth 
immediately after his uncle's death, while every terrace- 
walk and flowering alley spoke of the poet's loving care. 
He tells of the " tall ash-tree, in which a thrush has sung, 
for hours together, during many years;" of the "labur- 



Tin.] LIFE AT RYDAL MOUNT. ' 87 

num in which the osier cage of the doves was hung ;" of 
the stone steps " in the interstices of which grow the yel- 
low flowering poppy, and the wild geranium or Poor 
Robin"— 

"Gay 
'With his red stalks upon a sunny day." 

And then of the terraces — one levelled for Miss Fenwick's 
use, and welcome to himself in aged years ; and one ascend- 
ing, and leading to the " far terrace " on the mountain's 
side, where the poet was wont to murmur his verses as they 
came. Within the house were disposed his simple treas- 
ures: the ancestral almery, on which the names of un- 
known Wordsworths may be deciphered still ; Sir George 
Beaumont's pictures of " The White Doe of Rylstone " and 
" The Thorn," and the cuckoo clock which brought vernal 
thoughts to cheer the sleepless bed of age, and which 
sounded its noonday summons when his spirit fled. 

Wordsworth's worldly fortunes, as if by some benignant 
guardianship of Providence, were at all times proportioned 
to his successive needs. About the date of his removal 
to Rydal (in March, 1813) he was appointed, through Lord 
Lonsdale's interest, to the distributorship of stamps for 
the county of Westmoreland, to which office the same 
post for Cumberland was afterwards added. He held this 
post till August, 1842, when he resigned it without a retir- 
ing pension, and it was conferred on his second son. He 
was allowed to reside at Rydal, which was counted as a 
suburb of Ambleside ; and as the duties of the place were 
light, and mainly performed by a most competent and de- 
voted clerk, there was no drawback to the advantage of an 
increase of income which released him from anxiety as to 
the future. A more lucrative office — the collectorship of 
Whitehaven — was subsequently offered to him; but he 



88 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

declined it, "nor would exchange his Sabine valley for 
riches and a load of care." 

Though Wordsworth's life at Rydal was a retired one, 
it was not that of a recluse. As years went on he became 
more and more recognized as a centre of spiritual strengtli 
and illumination, and was sought not only by those who 
were already his neighbours, but by some who became so 
mainly for bis sake. Southey at Keswick was a valued 
friend, though Wordsworth did not greatly esteem him as 
a poet. De Quincey, originally attracted to the district 
by admiration for Wordsworth, remained there for many 
years, and poured forth a criticism strangely compounded 
of the utterances of the hero-worshipper and the valet-de- 
chmnhre. Professor Wilson, of the Nodes Amhrosiance, 
never showed, perhaps, to so much advantage as when he 
walked by the side of the master whose greatness he was 
one of the first to detect. Dr. Arnold of Rugby made the 
neighbouring home at Fox How a focus of warm affections 
and of intellectual life. And Hartley Coleridge, whose 
fairy childhood had inspired one of Wordsworth's happiest 
pieces, continued to lead among the dales of Westmoreland 
a life which showed how much of genius and goodness a 
single weakness can nullify. 

Other friends there were, too, less known to fame, but 
of exceptional powers of appreciation and sympathy. The 
names of Mrs. Fletcher and her daughters. Lady Richard- 
son and Mrs. Davy, should not be omitted in any record 
of the poet's life at Rydal. And many humbler neigh- 
bours may be recognized in the characters of the Excursion 
and other poems. The Wanderer, indeed, is a picture of 
Wordsworth himself — " an idea," as he says, " of what I 
fancied my own character might have become in his cir- 
cumstances." But the Solitary was suggested by a broken 



^i„.] "THE EXCURSION." 89 

man who took refuge in Grasmere from the world in which 
he had found no peace ; and the characters described as 
lying in the churchyard among the mountains are almost 
all o^f them portraits. The clergyman and his family de- 
scribed in Book VII. were among the poet's principal as- 
sociates in the vale of Grasmere. " There was much talent 
in the family," says Wordsworth, in the memoranda dic- 
tated to Miss Fenwick ; " and the eldest son was distin- 
guished for poetical talent, of which a specimen is given 
in my Notes to the Sonnets on the Duddon. Once when, 
in our cottage at Townend, I was talking with him about 
poetry, in the course of our conversation I presumed to 
find fault with the versification of Pope, of whom he was 
an enthusiastic admirer. He defended hini with a warmth 
that indicated much irritation ; nevertheless, I could not 
abandon my point, and said, ' In compass and variety of 
sound your own versification surpasses his.' Never shall 
I forget the change in his countenance and tone of voice. 
The storm was laid in a moment ; he no longer disputed 
mv judgment; and I passed immediately in his mind, no 
doubt, for as great a critic as ever lived." 

It was with personages simple and unromantic as these 
that Wordsworth filled the canvas of his longest poem. 
Judged by ordinary standards the Excursion appears an 
epic without action, and with two heroes, the Pastor and 
the Wanderer, whose characters are identical. Its form is 
cumbrous in the extreme, and large tracts of it have little 
claim to the name of poetry. Wordsworth compares the 
Excursion to a temple of which his smaller poems form 
subsidiary shrines ; but the reader will more often liken 
the small poems to gems, and the Excursion to the rock 
from which they were extracted. The long poem con- 
tains, indeed, magnificent passages, but as a whole it is a 



90 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

diffused description of scenery which the poet has else- 
where caught in brighter glimpses ; a diffused statement 
of hopes and beliefs which have crystallized more exqui- 
sitely elsewhere round moments of inspiring emotion. 
The Excursion, in short, has the drawbacks of a didactic 
poem as compared with lyrical poems ; but, judged as a 
didactic poem, it has the advantage of containing teaching 
of true and permanent value. 

I shall not attempt to deduce a settled scheme of phi- 
losophy from these discourses among the mountains. I 
would urge only that, as a guide to conduct, Wordsworth's 
precepts are not in themselves either unintelligible or vis- 
ionary. For whereas some moralists would have us amend 
Nature, and others bid us follow her, there is apt to be 
something impracticable in the first maxim, and something 
vague in the second. Asceticism, quietism, enthusiasm, 
ecstasy — all systems which imply an unnatural repression 
or an unnatural excitation of our faculties — are ill-suited 
for the mass of mankind. And on the other hand, if we 
are told to follow nature, to develope our original charac- 
ter, we are too often in doubt as to which of our conflict- 
ing instincts to follow, what part of our complex nature to 
accept as our regulating self. But Wordsworth, while im- 
pressing on us conformity to nature as the rule of life, 
suggests a test of such conformity which can be practical- 
ly applied. "The child is father of the man" — in the 
words which stand as introduction to his poetical works, 
and Wordsworth holds that the instincts and pleasures of 
a healthy childhood sufficiently indicate the lines on which 
our maturer character should be formed. The joy which 
began in the mere sense of existence should be maintained 
by hopeful faith ; the simplicity which began in inexperi- 
ence should be recovered by meditation ; the love which 



viii.] "THE EXCURSION." 91 

originated in the family circle should expand itself over 
the race of men. And the calming and elevating influence 
of Nature — which to Wordsworth's memory seemed the 
inseparable concomitant of childish years — should be con- 
stantly invoked throughout life to keep the heart fresh 
and the eyes open to the mysteries discernible through 
her radiant veil. In a word, the family affections, if duly 
fostered, the influences of Nature, if duly sought, with 
some knowledge of the best books, are material enough to 
" build up our moral being" and to outweigh the less deep- 
seated impulses which prompt to wrong-doing. 

If, then, surrounding influences make so decisive a dif- 
ference in man's moral lot, what are we to say of those 
who never have the chance of receiving those influences 
aright ; who are reared, with little parental supervision, in 
smoky cities, and spend their lives in confined and monot- 
onous labour? One of the most impressive passages in 
the Excursion is an indignant complaint of the injustice 
thus done to the factory child. Wordsworth was no 
fanatical opponent of manufacturing industry. He had 
intimate friends among manufacturers ; and in one of his 
letters he speaks of promising himself much pleasure from 
witnessing the increased regard for the welfare of factory 
hands of which one of these friends had set the example. 
But he never lost sight of the fact that the life of the 
mill-hand is an anomaly — is a life not in the order of nat- 
ure, and which requires to be justified by manifest neces- 
sity and by continuous care. The question to what extent 
we may acquiesce in the continuance of a low order of 
human beings, existing for our enjoyment rather than for 
their own, may be answered with plausibility in very dif- 
ferent tones ; from the Communist who cannot acquiesce 
in the inferiority of any one man's position to any other's, 
5 



92 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

to the pliilosopher who holds that mankind has made the 
most eminent progress when a few chosen individuals have 
been supported in easy brilliancy by a population of serfs 
or slaves. Wordsworth's answer to this question is at 
once conservative and philanthropic. He holds to the dis- 
tinction of classes, and thus admits a difference in the ful- 
ness and value of human lots. But he will not consent to 
any social arrangement which implies a necessary moral 
inferiority in any section of the body politic ; and he 
esteems it the statesman's first duty to provide that all 
citizens shall be placed under conditions of life which, 
however humble, shall not be unfavourable to virtue. 

His views on national education, which at first sight ap- 
pear so inconsistent, depend on the same conception of 
national welfare. AVordsworth was one of the earliest and 
most emphatic proclaimers of the duty of the State in this 
respect. The lines in which he insists that every child 
ought to be taught to read are, indeed, often quoted as an 
example of the moralizing baldness of much of his blank 
verse. But, on the other hand, when a great impulse was 
given to education (1820-30) by Bell and Lancaster, by 
the introduction of what was called the " Madras system " 
of tuition by pupil -teachers, and the spread of infant 
schools, Wordsworth was found unexpectedly in the op- 
posite camp. Considering as he did all mental require- 
ments as entirely subsidiary to moral progress, and in 
themselves of very little value, he objected to a system 
which, instead of confining itself to reading — that indis- 
pensable channel of moral nutriment — aimed at communi- 
cating knowledge as varied and advanced as time and funds 
would allow. He objected to the dissociation of school 
and home life — to that relegation of domestic interests and 
duties to the background, which large and highly-organized 



Till.] " THE EXCURSION." 93 

schools, and teachers much above the home level, must 
necessarily involve. And yet more strongly, and as it may 
still seem to many minds, with convincing reason, he ob- 
jected to an eleemosynary systein, which " precludes the 
poor mother from the strongest motive human nature can 
be actuated by for industry, for forethought, and self- 
denial." " The Spartan," he said, " and other ancient com- 
munities, might disregard domestic ties, because they had 
the substitution of country, which we cannot have. Our 
course is to supplant, domestic attachments, without the 
possibility of substituting others more capacious. What 
can grow out of it but selfishness?"- The half -century 
which has elapsed since AVordsworth wrote these w^ords 
has evidently altered the state of the question. It has im- 
pressed on us the paramount necessity of national educa- 
tion, for reasons political and social too well known to re- 
peat. But it may be feared that it has also shifted the 
incidence of Wordsworth's arguments in a more sinister 
manner, by vastly increasing the number of those homes 
where domestic influence of the kind which the poet saw 
around him at Rydal is altogether wanting, and school is 
the best avenue even to moral well-being. "Heaven and 
hell," he writes in 1808, "are scarcely more different from 
each other than Sheffield and Manchester, &c., differ from 
the plains and valleys of Surrey, Essex, Cumberland, or 
Westmoreland." It is to be feared, indeed, that even 
"the plains and valleys of Surrey and Essex" contain 
many cottages whose spiritual and sanitary conditions fall 
far short of the poet's ideal. But it is of course in the 
great and growing centres of population that the dangers 
which he dreads have come upon us in their most ag- 
gravated form. And so long as there are in England so 
many homes to which parental care and the influences of 



94 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

nature are alike unknown, no protest in favour of the 
paramount importance of these primary agencies in the 
formation of character can be regarded as altogether out 
of date. 

With such severe and almost prosaic themes is the 
greater part of the Excursion occupied. Yet the poem is 
far from being composed throughout in a prosaic spirit. 
" Of its bones is coral made ;" its arguments and theories 
have lain long in Wordsworth's mind, and have accreted 
to themselves a rich investiture of observation and feeling. 
Some of its passages rank among the poet's highest flights. 
Such is the passage in Book I. describing the boy's rapt- 
ure at sunrise ; and the picture of a sunset at the close 
of the same book. Such is the opening of Book IV. ; 
and the passage describing the wild joy of roaming through 
a mountain storm ; and the metaphor in the same book 
which compares the mind's power of transfiguring the 
obstacles which beset her, with the glory into which the 
moon incorporates the umbrage that would intercept her 
beams. 

It would scarcely be possible at the present day that a 
work containing such striking passages, and so much of 
substance and elevation — however out of keeping it might 
be with the ruling taste of the day — should appear with- 
out receiving careful study from many quarters and warm 
appreciation in some recognized organs of opmion. Criti- 
cism in Wordsworth's day was both less competent and 
less conscientious, and the famous "this will never do" 
of Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Revieio was by no means an 
extreme specimen of the general tone in Avhich the work 
w^as received. The judgment of the reviewers influenced 
popular taste ; and the book was as decided a pecuniary 
failure as Wordsworth's previous ventures had been. 



VIII.] "THE EXCURSION." 95 

And here, perhaps, is a fit occasion to speak of that 
strangely violent detraction and abuse which formed so 
large an ingredient in Wordsworth's life — or, rather, of 
that which is the only element of permanent interest in 
such a matter — his manner of receiving and replying to 
it. No writer, probably, who has afterwards achieved a 
reputation at all like Wordsworth's, has been so long rep- 
resented by reviewers as purely ridiculous. And in Words- 
worth's manner of acceptance of this fact we may dis- 
cern all the strength, and something of the stiffness, of 
his nature ; we may recognize an almost, but not quite, 
ideal attitude under the shafts of unmerited obloquy. 
For he who thus is arrogantly censured should remember 
both the dignity and the frailty of man ; he should wholly 
forgive, and almost wholly forget ; but, nevertheless, should 
retain such serviceable hints as almost any criticism, how^- 
ever harsh or reckless, can afford, and go on his way with 
no bitter broodings, but yet (to use Wordsworth's ex- 
pression in another context) " with a melancholy in the 
soul, a sinking inward into ourselves from thought to 
thought, a steady remonstrance, and a high resolve." 

How far his own self-assertion may becomingly be car- 
ried in reply, is another and a delicate question. There 
is almost necessarily something distasteful to us not only 
in self-praise but even in a thorough self -appreciation. 
We desire of the ideal character that his faculties of ad- 
miration should be, as it were, absorbed in an eager per- 
ception of the merits of others — that a kind of shrinking 
delicacy should prevent him from appraising his own 
achievements with a similar care. Often, indeed, there is 
somethino: most winnins; in a touch of humorous blind- 
uess : " Well, Miss Sophia, and how do you like the 
Lady of the Lake P " Oh, I've not read it ; papa says 



96 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

there's notliing so bad for young people as reading bad 
poetry." 

But there are circumstances under which this graceful 
absence of self-consciousness can no longer be maintained. 
When a man believes that he has a message to deliver 
that vitally concerns mankind, and when that message is 
received with contempt and apathy, he is necessarily driv- 
en back upon himself ; he is forced to consider whether 
what he has to say is after all so important, and whether 
his mode of saying it be right and adequate. A neces- 
sity of this kind was forced upon both Shelley and Words- 
worth. Shelley — the very type of self -forgetful enthu- 
siasm — was driven at last by the world's treatment of him 
into a series of moods sometimes bitter and sometimes 
self-distrustful — into a sense of aloofness -and detachment 
from the mass of men, which the poet who would fain 
improve and exalt them should do his utmost not to feel. 
On Wordsworth's more stubborn nature the effect pro- 
duced by many years of detraction was of a different kind. 
Naturally introspective, he w^as driven by abuse and ridi- 
cule into taking stock of himself more frequently and 
more laboriously than ever. He- formed an estimate of 
himself and his writings which was, on the whole (as will 
now be generally admitted), a just one ; and this view he 
expressed when occasion offered — in sober language, in- 
deed, but with calm conviction, and with precisely the 
same air of speaking from undoubted knowledge as when 
he described the beauty of Cumbrian mountains or the 
virtue of Cumbrian homes. 

" It is impossible," he wrote to Lady Beaumont in 1807, 
" that any expectations can be lower than mine concern- 
ing the immediate effect of this little work upon what is 
called the public. I do not here take into consideration 



Till.] " THE EXCURSION." 97 

the envy and malevolence, and all the bad passions whicli 
always stand in the way of a work of any merit from a 
living poet; but merely think of the pure, absolute, 
honest ignorance in which all worldlings, of every rank 
and situation, must be enveloped, with respect to the 
thoughts, feelings, and images on which the life of my 
poems depends. The things which I have taken, whether 
from within or without, what have they to do with routs, 
dinners, morning calls, hurry from door to door, from 
street to street, on foot or in carriage ; with Mr. Pitt or 
Mr. Fox, Mr. Paul or Sir Fi-ancis Burdett,. the West- 
minster election or the borough of Honiton ? In a word 
— for I cannot stop to make my way through the hurry 
of images that present themselves to me — what have they 
to do with endless talking about things that nobody cares 
anything for, except as far as their own vanity is con- 
cerned, and this with persons they care nothing for, but 
as their vanity or selfishness is concerned? What have 
they to do (to say all at once) with a life without love ? 
In such a life there can be no thought; for Ave have no 
thought (save thoughts of pain), but as far as we have 
love and admiration. 

" It is an awf 111 truth, that there neither is nor can be 
any genuine enjoyment of poetry among nineteen out of 
twenty of those persons who live, or wish to live, in the 
broad light of the world — among those who either are, or 
are striving to make themselves, people of consideration in 
society. This is a truth, and an awful one ; because to be 
incapable of a feeling of poetry, in my sense of the word, 
is to be without love of human nature and reverence for 
God. 

" Upon this I shall insist elsewhere ; at present let me 
confine myself to my object, which is to make you, my 



98 WORDSWORTH. [cii.iP. 

dear friend, as easy-hearted as myself with respect to these 
poems. Trouble not yourself upon their present recep- 
tion. Of what moment is that compared with what I 
trust is their destiny ? — to console the afflicted ; to add 
sunshine to daylight, by making the happy happier ; to 
teach the young and the gracious of every age to see, to 
think, and feel, and therefore to become more actively 
and securely virtuous ; this is their office, which I trust 
they will faithfully perform long after we (that is, all that 
is mortal of us) are mouldered in our graves." 

Such words as these come with dignity from the mouth 
of a man like Wordsworth when he has been, as it were, 
driven to bay — when he is consoling an intimate friend, 
distressed at the torrent of ridicule which, as she fears, 
must sweep his self-confidence and his purposes away. He 
may be permitted to assure her that " my ears are stone- 
dead to this idle buzz, and my flesh as insensible as iron 
to these petty stings," and to accompany his assurance 
with a reasoned statement of the grounds of his unskaken 
hopes. 

We feel, however, that such an expression of self-reli- 
ance on the part of a great man should be accompanied 
with some proof that no conceit or impatience is mixed 
with his steadfast. calm. If he believes the public to be 
really unable to appreciate himself, he must show no sur- 
prise when they admire his inferiors ; he must remember 
that the case would be far worse if they admired no one 
at all. Nor must he descend from his own unpopular 
merits on the plea that after catching the public attention 
by what is bad he will retain it for what is good. If he 
is so sure that he is in the right he can afi;ord to wait and 
let the world come round to him. Wordsworth's conduct 
satisfies both these tests. It is, indeed, curious to observe 



Tin.] "THE EXCURSION." 99 

liow mucli abuse tliis inoffensive recluse received, and liow 
absolutely lie avoided returning it. Byron, for instance, 
must have seemed in his eyes guilty of something far 
more injurious to mankind than " a drowsy, frowsy poem, 
called the Excursion,^'' could possibly appear. But, ex- 
cept in one or two private letters, Wordsworth has nev- 
er alluded to Byron at all. Shelley's lampoon — a singu- 
lar instance of the random blows of a noble spirit, strik- 
ing at what, if better understood, it would eagerly have 
revered — Wordsworth seems never to have read. Nor 
did the violent attacks of the Edinburgh and the Quarter- 
ly Revieius provoke him to any rejoinder. To " English 
Bards and Scotch Reviewers " — leagued against him as 
their common prey — he opposed a dignified silence ; and 
the only moral injury which he derived from their as- 
saults lay in that sense of the absence of trustworthy ex- 
ternal criticism which led him to treat everything which 
he had once written down as if it were a special revela- 
tion, and to insist with equal earnestness on his most tri- 
fling as on his most important pieces — on Goody Blake 
and The Idiot Boy as on The Cuckoo or The Daffodils. 
The sense of humour is apt to be the first grace which is 
lost under persecution ; and much of Wordsworth's heavi- 
ness and stiff exposition of commonplaces is to be traced 
to a feeling which he could scarcely avoid, that " all day 
long he had lifted up his voice to a perverse and gainsay- 
ing generation." 

To the pecuniary loss inflicted on him by these adverse 
criticisms he was justly sensible. He was far from ex- 
pecting, or even desiring, to be widely popular or to make 
a rapid fortune ; but he felt that the labourer was worthy 
of his hire, and that the devotion of years to literature 
should have been met with some moderate degree of the 
5* 



100 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

usual form of recognition which the world accords to 
those who work for it. In 1820 he speaks of "the whole 
of my returns from the writing trade not amounting to 
seven -score pounds;" and as late as 1843, when at the 
height of his fame, he was not ashamed of confessing 
the importance which he had always attached to this par- 
ticular. 

"So sensible am I," he says, "of the deficiencies in all 
that I write, and so far does everything that I attempt fall 
short of what I wish it to be, that even private publica- 
tion, if such a term may be allowed, requires more resolu- 
tion than I can command. I have written to give vent to 
my own mind, and not without hope that, some time or 
other, kindred minds might benefit by my labours ; but I 
am inclined to believe I should never have ventured to 
send forth any verses of mine to the world, if it had not 
been done on the pressure of personal occasions. Had I 
been a rich man, my productions, like this Ujyistle, the 
Tragedy of the Borderers, &c., would most likely have been 
confined to manuscript." 

An interesting passage from an unpublished letter of 
Miss Wordsworth's, on the White Doe of Rylstone, con- 
firms this statement : 

" My brother was very much pleased with your frankness in tell- 
ing us that you did not perfectly like his poem. He wishes to know 
what your feelings were — whether the tale itself did not interest you 
— or whether you could not enter into the conception of Emily's 
character, or take delight in that visionary communion which is 
supposed to have existed between her and the Doe. Do not fear to 
give him pain. He is far too much accustomed to be abused to re- 
ceive pain from it (at least as far as he himself is concerned). My 
reason for asking you these questions is, that some of our friends, 
who are equal admirers of the White Doe and of my brother's pub- 
lished poems, think that this poem will sell on account of the story; 



Tin.] "THE EXCURSION." 101 

that is, that the story will bear up those points which are above the 
level of the public taste ; whereas, the two last volumes — except by 
a few solitary individuals, who are passionately devoted to my broth- 
er's works — are abused by wholesale. 

" Xow, as his sole object in publishing this poem at present would 
be for the sake of the money, he w^ould not publish it if he did not 
think, from the several judgments of his friends, that it would be 
likely to have a sale. He has no pleasure in publishing — he even 
detests it ; and if it were not that he is 7iot over-wealthy, he would 
leave all his works to be published after his death. William himself 
is sure that the White Doe will not sell or be admired, except by a 
very few, at first ; and only yields to Mary's entreaties and mine. 
We are determined, however, if we are deceived this time, to let him 
have his own way in future." 

These passages must be taken, no doubt, as represent- 
ing one aspect only of the poet's impulses in the matter. 
With his deep conviction of the world's real, though un- 
recognized, need of a pure vein of poetry, we can hardly 
imagine him as permanently satisfied to defer his own 
contribution till after his death. Yet we may certainly 
believe that the need of money helped him to overcome 
much diffidence as to publication ; and we may discern 
something dignified in his frank avowal of this when it 
is taken in connexion with his scrupulous abstinence from 
any attempt to win the suffrages of the multitude by 
means unworthy of his high vocation. He could never, 
indeed, have written poems which could have vied in im- 
mediate popularity with those of Byron or Scott. But 
the criticisms on the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads 
must have shown him that a slight alteration of method — 
nay, even the excision of a few pages in each volume, 
pages certain to be loudly objected to — would have made 
a marked difference in the sale and its proceeds. From 
this point of view, even poems which we may now feel to 



102 WORDSWORTH. [chap. viii. 

have been needlessly puerile and grotesque acquire a cer- 
tain impressiveness, when we recognize that the theory 
which demanded their composition was one which their 
author was willing to uphold at the cost of some years 
of real physical privation, and of the postponement for a 
generation of his legitimate fame. 



CHAPTER IX. 



The Excursion appeared in 1814, and in the course of the 
next year AVordsworth republished his minor poems, so 
arranged as to indicate the faculty of the mind which he 
considered to have been predominant in the composition 
of each. To most readers this disposition has always 
seemed somewhat arbitrary ; and it was once suggested to 
Wordsworth that a chronological arrangement would be 
better. The manner in which Wordsworth met this pro- 
posal indicated the limit of his absorption in himself — 
his real desire only to dwell on his own feelings in such a 
way as might make them useful to others. For he reject- 
ed the plan as too egoistical — as emphasizing the succes- 
sion of moods in the poet's mind, rather than the lessons 
which those moods could teach. His objection points, at 
any rate, to a real danger which any man's simplicity of 
character incurs by dwelling too attentively on the chang- 
ing phases of his own thought. But after the writer's 
death the historical spirit will demand that poems, like 
other artistic products, should be disposed for the most 
part in the order of time. 

In a preface to this edition of 1815, and a supplemen- 
tary essay, he developed the theory on poetry already set 
forth in a well-known preface to the second edition of the 



104 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

Lyrical Ballads. Mucli of the matter of these essays, re- 
ceived at the time with contemptuous aversion, is now ac- 
cepted as truth ; and few compositions of equal length con- 
tain so much of vigorous criticism and sound reflection. 
It is only when they generalize too confidently that they 
are in danger of misleading us ; for all expositions of the 
art and practice of poetry must necessarily be incomplete. 
Poetry, like all the arts, is essentially .a "mystery." Its 
charm depends upon qualities which we can neither define 
accurately, nor reduce to rule, nor create again at pleasure. 
Mankind, however, are unwilling to admit this ; and they 
endeavour from time to time to persuade themselves that 
they have discovered the rules which will enable them to 
produce the desired effect. And so much of the effect can 
thus be reproduced, that it is often possible to believe for 
a time that the problem has been solved. Pope, to take 
the instance which was prominent in Wordsworth's mind, 
was by general admission a poet. But his success seemed 
to depend on imitable peculiarities ; and Pope's imitators 
were so like Pope that it was hard to draw a line and say 
where they ceased to be poets. At last, however, this im- 
itative school began to prove too much. If all the insipid 
verses which they wrote were poetry, what was the use of 
writing poetry at all ? A reaction succeeded, which as- 
serted that poetry depends on emotion, and not on polish ; 
that it consists precisely in those things which frigid im- 
itators lack. Cowper, Burns, and Crabbe (especially in his 
Sir LJusiace Grey) had preceded Wordsworth as leaders of 
this reaction. But they had acted half unconsciously, or 
had even at times themselves attempted to copy the very 
style which they were superseding. 

Wordsworth, too, began with a tendency to imitate 
Pope, but only in the school exercises which he wrote as 



Lx.] FOETIO DICTION. 105 

a boy. Poetry soon became to him the expression of his 
own deep and simple feelings ; and then he rebelled against 
rhetoric and unreality, and found for himself a directer and 
truer voice. " I have proposed to myself to imitate and, 

as far as is possible, to adopt the very language of men 

I have taken as much pains to avoid what is usually called 
poetic diction as others ordinarily take to produce it." And 
he erected this practice into a general principle in the fol- 
lowing passage : 

" I do not doubt that it may be safely affirmed that there neither 
is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose 
and metrical composition. We are fond of tracing the resemblance 
between poetry and painting, and accordingly we call them sisters ; 
but where shall we find bonds of connexion sufficiently strict to typify 
the affinity between metrical and prose composition ? If it be affirm- 
ed that rhyme and metrical arrangement of themselves constitute a 
distinction which overturns what I have been saying on the strict 
affinity of metrical language with that of prose, and paves the way 
for other artificial distinctions which the mind voluntarily admits, I 
answer that the language of such poetry as I am recommending is, 
as far as is possible, a selection of the language really spoken by 
men ; that this selection, wherever it is made with true taste and 
feeling, will of itself form a distinction far greater than would at 
first be imagined, and will entirely separate the composition from the 
vulgarity and meanness of ordinary life ; and if metre be superadded 
thereto, I believe that a dissimilitude will be produced altogether suf- 
ficient for the gratification of a rational mind. What other distinc- 
tion would we have ? whence is it to come ? and where is it to exist ?" 

There is a definiteness and simplicity about this descrip- 
tion of poetry which may well make us wonder why this 
precious thing (producible, apparently, as easily as Pope's 
imitators supposed, although by means different from 
theirs) is not offered to us by more persons, and of better 
quality. And it will not be hard to show that a good 



106 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

poetical style must possess certain characteristics which, 
although something like them must exist in a good prose 
style, are carried in poetry to a pitch so much higher as 
virtually to need a specific faculty for their successful pro- 
duction. 

To illustrate the inadequacy of Wordsworth's theory to 
explain the merits of his own poetry, I select a stanza 
from one of his simplest and most characteristic poems, 
The Affliction of Margaret : 

" Perhaps some dungeon hears thee groan, 
Manned, mangled by mhuman men, 
Or thou upon a Desert thrown 
Inheritest the lion's Den ; 
Or hast been summoned to the Deep, 
Thou, thou and all thy mates, to keep 
An incommunicable sleep." 

These lines, supposed to be uttered by " a poor widow 
at Penrith," afford a fair illustration of what Wordsworth 
calls " the language really spoken by men," with " metre 
superadded." " What other distinction from prose," he 
asks, " would we have ?" We may answer that we would 
have what he has actually given us, viz., an appropriate 
and attractive music, lying both in the rhythm and in the 
actual sound of the words used — a music whose complex- 
ity may be indicated here by drawing out some of its ele- 
ments in detail, at the risk of appearing pedantic and 
technical. We observe, then (a), that the general move- 
ment of the lines is unusually slow. They contain a very 
large proportion of strong accents and long vowels, to suit 
the tone of deep and despairing sorrow. In six places 
only out of twenty-eight is the accent weak where it might 
be expected to be strong (in the second syllable, namely, 
of the iambic foot), and in each of these cases the omis- 



IX.] POETIC DICTION. 107 

sion of a possible accent throws greater weight on the 
next succeeding accent — on the accents, that is to say, 
contained in the words inhuman, desert, lion, summoned, 
deep, and sleep, (b) The first four lines contain subtle 
alliterations of the letters d, h, m, and th. In this con- 
nexion it should be remembered that when consonants 
are thus repeated at the beginning of syllables, those syl- 
lables need not be at the beginning of words ; and fur- 
ther, that repetitions scarcely more numerous than chance 
alone would have occasioned may be so placed by the 
poet as to produce a strongly - felt effect. If any one 
doubts the effectiveness of the unobvious alliterations 
here insisted on, let him read (l) "jungle" for "desert," 
(2) "maybe" for "perhaps," (3) "tortured" for "man- 
gled," (4) "blown" for "thrown," and he will become 
sensible of the lack of the metrical support which the 
existing consonants give one another. The three last 
lines contain one or two similar alliterations on which I 
need not dwell, (c) The words inheritest and summoned 
are by no means such as " a poor widow," even at Pen- 
rith, would employ ; they are used to intensify the imag- 
ined relation which connects the missing man with (1) 
the wild beasts who surround him, and (2) the invisible 
Power which leads ; so that something mysterious and 
awful is added to his fate, {d) This impression is height- 
ened by the use of the word incommunicable in an unu- 
sual sense, " incapable of being communicated with^'' in- 
stead of " incapable of being communicated ;" while {e) 
the expression " to keep an incommunicable sleep " for 
" to lie dead," gives dignity to the occasion by carrying 
the mind back along a train of literary Associations of 
which the well-known iiri^\xova rijype-oy uwvov of Mos- 
chus may be taken as the type. 



108 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

We must not, of course, suppose that Wordsworth con- 
sciously sought these alhterations, arranged these accents, 
resolved to introduce an unusual word in the last line, or 
hunted for a classical allusion. But what the poet's brain 
does not do consciously it does unconsciously ; a selective 
action is going on in its recesses simultaneously with the 
overt train of thought, and on the degree of this uncon- 
scious suggestiveness the richness and melody of the poe- 
try will depend. 

No rules can secure the attainment of these effects ; and 
the very same artifices which are delightful when used by 
one man seem mechanical and offensive Avhen used by 
another. Nor is it by any means always the case that 
the man who can most delicately appreciate the melody 
of the poetry of others will be able to produce similar mel- 
ody himself. Nay, even if he can produce it one year, it 
by no means follows that he will be able to produce it 
the next. Of all qualifications for writing poetry this in- 
ventive music is the most arbitrarily distributed, and the 
most evanescent. But it is the more important to dwell 
on its necessity, inasmuch as both good and bad poets are 
tempted to ignore it. The good poet prefers to ascribe 
his success to higher qualities ; to his imagination, eleva- 
tion of thought, descriptive faculty. The bad poet can 
more easily urge that his thoughts are too advanced for 
mankind to appreciate than that his melody is too sweet 
for their ears to catch. And when the gift vanishes no 
poet is willing to confess that it is gone ; so humiliating 
is it to lose power over mankind by the loss of something 
which seems quite independent of intellect or character. 
And yet so it is. For some twenty years at most (l798- 
1818) Wordsworth possessed this gift of melody. During 
those years he wrote works which profoundly influenced 



IX.] POETIC DICTION. 109 

mankind. The gift then left him ; he continued as wise 
and as earnest as ever, but his poems had no longer any 
potency, nor his existence much public importance. 

Humiliating as such reflections may seem, they are in 
accordance with actual experience in all branches of art. 
The fact is that the pleasures which art gives us arc com- 
plex in the extreme. We are always disposed to dwell 
on such of their elements as are explicable, and can in 
some way be traced to moral or intellectual sources. But 
they contain also other elements which are inexplicable, 
non-moral, and non-mtellectual, and which render most of 
our attempted explanations of artistic merit so incomplete 
as to be practically misleading. Among such incomplete 
explanations Wordsworth's essays must certainly be ranked. 
It would not be safe for any man to believe that he had 
produced true poetry because he had fulfilled the condi- 
tions which AVordsworth lays down. But the essays ef- 
fected what is perhaps as much as the writer on art can 
fairly hope to accomplish. They placed in a striking 
light that side of the subject which had been too long 
ignored ; they aided in recalling an art which had be- 
come conventional and fantastic into the normal current 
of English thought and speech. 

It may be added that, both in doctrine and practice, 
Wordsworth exhibits a progressive reaction from the ex- 
treme views with which he starts towards that common 
vein of good sense and sound judgment which may be 
traced back to Horace, Longinus, and Aristotle. His first 
preface is violently polemic. He attacks with reason that 
conception of the sublime and beautiful which is repre- 
sented by Dryden's picture of " Cortes alone in his night- 
gown," remarking that " the mountains seem to nod their 
drowsy heads." But the only example of true poetry 



110 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

which he sees fit to adduce in contrast consists in a stanza 
from the Babes in the Wood. In his preface of 1815 he 
is not less severe on false sentiment and false observation. 
But his views of the complexity and dignity of poetry 
have been much developed, and he is willing now to draw 
his favourable instances from Shakspeare, Milton, Virgil, 
and himself. 

His own practice underwent a corresponding change. 
It is only to a few poems of his earlier years that the fa- 
mous parody of the .Rejected Addresses fairly applies — 

" My father's walls are made of brick, 
But not so tall and not so thick 

As these ; and goodness me ! 
My father's beams are made of wood, 
But never, never half so good 

As those that now I see !" 

Lines something like these might have occurred in The 
Thorn or The Idiot Boy. Nothing could be more different 
from the style of the sonnets, or of the Ode to Duty, or of 
Laodamia. And yet both the simplicity of the earlier and 
the pomp of the later poems were almost always noble ; 
nor is the transition from the one style to the' other a per- 
plexing or abnormal thing. For all sincere styles are con- 
gruous to one another, whether they be adorned or no, as 
all high natures are congruous to one another, whether in 
the garb of peasant or of prince. What is incongruous to 
both is affectation, vulgarity, egoism ; and while the noble 
style can be interchangeably childlike or magnificent, as its 
theme requires, the ignoble can neither simplify itself into 
purity nor deck itself into grandeur. 

It need not, therefore, surprise us to find the classical 
models becomino; more and more dominant in Words- 



% 



XX.] 



"LAODAMIA." Ill 



worth's mind, till tlie poet of Poor Susan and The Cuckoo 
spends months over the attempt to translate the ^neid — 
to win the secret of that style which he placed at the head 
of all poetic styles, and of those verses which " wind," as 
he says, " with the majesty of the Conscript Fathers enter- 
ino- the Senate-house in solemn procession," and envelope 
in their imperial melancholy all the sorrows and the fates 
of man. 

And, indeed, so tranquil and uniform was the life which 
we are now retracing, and at the same time so receptive 
of any noble influence which opportunity might bring, 
that a real epoch is marked in Wordsworth's poetical career 
by the mere rereading of some Latin authors in 1814-16 
with a view to preparing his eldest son for the University. 
Among the poets whom he thus studied was one in whom 
he might seem to discern his own spirit endowed with 
grander proportions, and meditating on sadder fates. 
Among the poets of the battlefield, of the study, of the 
boudoir, he encountered the first Priest of Nature, the 
first poet in Europe who had deliberately shunned the 
life of courts and cities for the mere joy in Nature's pres- 
ence, for " sweet Parthenope and the fields beside Vesevus' 
hill." 

There are, indeed, passages in the Georgks so Words- 
worthian, as we now call it, in tone, that it is hard to real- 
ize what centuries separated them from the Sonnet to Lady 
Beaumord or from Ruih. Such, for instance, is the pict- 
ure of the Corycian old man, who had made himself in- 
dependent of the seasons by his5 gardening skill, so that 
"when gloomy winter was still rending the stones with 
frost, still curbing with ice the rivers' onward flow, he even 
then was plucking the soft hyacinth's bloom, and chid the 
tardy summer and delaying airs of spring." Such, again, 



112 WORDSWOKTH. [chap. 

is tlie passage where the poet breaks from the glories of 
successful industry into the delight of watching the great 
processes which nature accomplishes untutored and alone, 
" the joy of gazing on Cytorus waving with boxwood, and 
on forests of Narycian pine, on tracts that never felt the 
harrow, nor knew the care of man." 

Such thoughts as these the Roman and the English poet 
had in common — the heritage of untarnished souls. 

"I asked; 'twas whispered: The device 
To each and all might Avell belong : 
It is the Spirit of Paradise 
That prompts such work, a Spirit strong, 
That gives to all the self-same bent 
Where life is wise and innocent." 

It is not only in tenderness but in dignity that the 
"wise and innocent" are wont to be at one. Strong in 
tranquillity, they can intervene amid great emotions with 
a master's voice, and project on the storm of passion the 
clear light of their unchanging calm. And thus it was 
that the study of Virgil, and especially of Virgil's solemn 
picture of the Underworld, prompted in Wordsworth's 
mind the most majestic of his poems, his one great utter- 
ance on heroic love. 

He had as yet written little on any such topic as this. 
At Goslar he had composed the poems on Lucy to which 
allusion has already been made. And after his happy 
marriage he had painted in one of the best known of his 
poems the sweet transitions of wedded love, as it moves on 
from the first shock and agitation of the encounter of pre- 
destined souls through all tendernesses of intimate affection 
into a pervading permanency and calm. Scattered, more- 
over, throughout his poems are several passages in which 



IX.] "LAODAMIA." 113 

the passion is treated with similar force and truth. The 
poem which begins " 'Tis said that some have died for 
love " depicts the enduring- poignancy of bereavement 
with an " iron pathos " that is ahiiost too strong for art. 
And something of the same power of cUnging attachment 
is shown in the sonnet where the poet is stung with the 
thought that " even for the least division of an hour " he 
has taken pleasure in the life around him, without the 
accustomed tacit reference to one who has passed away. 
There is a brighter touch of constancy in that other son- 
net where, after letting his fancy phiy over a glad imagi- 
nary past, he turns to his wife, ashamed that even in so 
vague a vision he could have shaped for himself a soli- 
tary joy : 

" Let her be comprehended in the frame 
Of these illusions, or they please no more." 

In later years the two sonnets on his wife's picture set 
on that love the consecration of faithful age; and there 
are thos« who can recall his look as he gazed on the pict- 
ure and tried to recognize in that aged face the Beloved 
who to him was ever young and fair — a look as of one 
dwelling in life-long affections with the unquestioning sin- 
gle-heartedness of a child. 

And here it might have been thought that as his expe- 
rience ended, his power of description would have ended 
too. But it was not so. Under the powerful stimulus of 
the sixth j^neid — allusions to which pervade Laodamia} 
throughout — with unusual labour, and by a strenuous ef- 
fort of the imagination, Wordsworth was enabled to depict 

* Laodamia should be read (as it is given in Mr. ilatthew Arnold's 
admirable volume of selections) with the earlier conclusion : the sec- 
ond form is less satisfactory ; and the third, with its sermonizing 
tone, " thus all in vain exhorted and reproved," is worst of all. 



114 WORDSWORTH. [cuap. 

his own love in excelsis, to imagine what aspect it might 
have worn, if it had been its destiny to deny itself at some 
heroic call, and to confront with nobleness an extreme 
emergency, and to be victor (as Plato has it) in an Olym- 
pian contest of the soul. For, indeed, the " fervent, not 
ungovernable, love," which is the ideal that Protesilaus is 
sent to teach, is on a great scale the same affection which 
we have been considering in domesticity and peace ; it is 
love considered not as a revolution but as a consummation ; 
as a self-abandonment not to a laxer but to a sterner law ; 
no longer as an invasive passion, but as the deliberate 
habit of the soul. It is that conception of love which 
springs into being in the last canto of Dante's Purga- 
tory — which finds in English chivalry a noble voice — 

" I could not love thee, dear, so much, 
Loved I not honour more." 

For, indeed (even as Plato says that Beauty is the splen- 
dour of Truth), so such a Love as this is the splendour of 
Virtue ; it is the unexpected spark that flashes from self- 
forgetful soul to soul, it is man's standing evidence that 
he "must lose himself to find himself," and that only 
when the veil of his personality has lifted from around 
him can he recognize that he is already in heaven. 

In a second poem inspired by this revived study of 
classical antiquity Wordsworth has traced the career of 
Dion — the worthy pupil of Plato, the philosophic ruler 
of Syracuse, who allowed himself to shed blood unjustly, 
though for the public good, and was haunted by a spectre 
symbolical of this fatal error. At last Dion was assassi- 
nated, and the words in which the poet tells his fate seem 
to me to breathe the very triumph of philosophy, to paint 
with a touch the greatness of a spirit which makes of 



IX.] "LAODAMIA." . 115 

Deatli liimself a deliverer, and lias its strength in the un- 
seen — 

"So were the hopeless troubles, that involved 
The soul of Dion, instantly dissolved." 

I can only compare these lines to that famous passage of 
Sophocles where the lamentations of the dying CEdipus 
are interrupted by the impatient summons of an unseen 
accompanying god. In both places the effect is the same — 
to present to us with striking brevity the contrast between 
the visible and the invisible presences that may stand about 
a man's last hour; for he may feel with the desolate 
(Edipus that " all I am has perished " — he may sink like 
Dion through inextricable sadness to a disastrous death, 
and then in a moment the transitory shall disappear and 
the essential shall be made plain, and from Dion's upright 
spirit the perplexities shall vanish away, and (Edipus, in 
the welcome of that unknown companionship, shall find 
his expiations over and his reward begun. 

It is true, no doubt, that when Wordsworth wrote these 
poems he had lost something of the young inimitable 
charm which fills such pieces as the Fountain or the Soli- 
tary Reaper. His language is majestic, but it is no longer 
magical. And yet we cannot but feel that he has put 
into these poems something which he could not have 
put into the poems which preceded them ; that they bear 
the impress of a soul which has added moral effort to 
poetic inspiration, and is mistress now of the acquired as 
well as of the innate virtue. For it is words like these 
that are the strength and stay of men ; nor can their ac- 
cent of lofty earnestness be simulated by the writer's art. 
Literary skill may deceive the reader who seeks a literary 
pleasure alone ; and he to whom these strong consolations 
are a mere imaginative luxury may be uncertain or indif- 
G 



116 WOKDSWORTH. [chap. 

ferent out of what heart they come. But those who need 
them know ; spirits that hunger after righteousness dis- 
cern their proper food; there is no fear lest they con- 
found the sentimental and superficial with those weighty 
utterances of moral truth which are the most precious leg- 
acy that a man can leave to mankind. 

Thus far, then, I must hold that, although much of 
grace had already vanished, there was on the whole a 
progress and elevation in the mind of him of whom we 
treat. But the culminating point is here. After this — 
w-hatever ripening process may have been at work unseen 
— what is chiefly visible is the slow stiffening of the im- 
aginative power, the slow withdrawal of the insight into 
the soul of things, and a descent — ufjXrj^^puc jxaXa tuIoq — 
" soft as soft can be," to the euthanasy of a death that 
was like sleep. 

The impression produced by Wordsworth's reperusal 
of Virgil in 1814-16 was a deep and lasting one. In 
1829-30 he devoted much time and labour to a transla- 
tion of the first three books of the uEneid^ and it is in- 
teresting to note the gradual modification of his views as 
to the true method of rendering poetry. 

" I have long been persuaded," he writes to Lord Lons- 
dale in 1829, "that Milton formed his blank verse upon 
the model of the Georgics and the ^neid, and I am so 
much struck with this resemblance, that I should have 
attempted Virgil in blank verse, had I not been persuaded 
that no ancient author can with advantage be so rendered. 
Their religion, their warfare, their course of action and 
feehng are too remote from modern interest to allow it. 
We require every possible help and attraction of sound 
in our language to smooth the way for the admission of 
things so remote from our present concerns. My own 



IX.] "LAODAMIA." 117 

notion of translation is, that it cannot be too literal, pro- 
vided these faults be avoided : baldness, in which I include 
all that takes from dignity ; and strangeness, or uncouth- 
ness, including harshness ; and lastly, attempts to convey 
meanings which, as they cannot be given but by languid 
circumlocutions, cannot in fact be said to be given at 
all. ... I feel it, however, to be too probable that my 
translation is deficient in ornament, because I must un- 
avoidably have lost many of Virgil's, and have never with- 
out reluctance attempted a compensation of my own." 

The truth of this last self-criticism is very apparent 
from the fragments of the translation which were publish- 
ed in the Philological Museum ; and Coleridge, to whom 
the whole manuscript was submitted, justly complains of 
finding " page after page without a single brilliant note ;" 
and adds, " Finally, my conviction is that you undertake 
an impossibility, and that there is no medium between a 
pure version and one on the avowed principle of compen- 
sation in the widest sense, ?'.e., manner, genius, total effect; 
I confine myself to Virgil when I say this." And it ap- 
pears that Wordsworth himself came round to this view, 
for, in reluctantly sending a specimen of his work to the 
Philological Museum in 1832, he says: 

" Having been displeased in modern translations with the addi- 
tions of incongruous matter, I began to translate with a resolve to 
keep clear of that fault by adding nothing ; but I became convinced 
that a spirited translation can scarcely be accomplished in the Eng- 
lish language without admitting a principle of compensation." 

There is a curious analogy between the experiences of 
Cowper and Wordsworth in the way of translation. 
Wordsworth's translation of Virgil was prompted by the 
same kind of reaction against the reckless laxity of Dry- 
den as that which inspired Cowper against the distorting 



118 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

artificiality of Pope. In each case tlie new translator cared 
more for liis author, and took a much higher view of a 
translator's duty, than liis predecessor had done. But in 
each case the plain and accurate translation was a failure, 
while the loose and ornate one continued to be admired. 
We need not conchide from this that the wilful inaccu- 
racy of Pope or Dryden would be any longer excusable in 
such a work. But, on the other hand, we may certainly 
feel that nothing is gained by rendering an ancient poet 
into verse at all unless that verse be of a quality to give a 
pleasure independent of the faithfulness of the translation 
which it conveys. 

The translations and Laodamia are not the only indica- 
tions of the influence which Virgil exercised over Words- 
worth. Whether from mere similarity of feeling, or from 
more or less conscious recollection, there are frequent pas- 
sages in the English which recall the Roman poet. Who 
can hear AVordsworth describe how a poet on the island in 

Grasmere 

" At noon 

Spreads out his limbs, while, yet unshorn, the sheep, 

Panthig beneath the burthen of their wool, 

Lie round him, even as if they were a part 

Of his own household " — 

and not think of the stately tenderness of Virgil's 

" Stant et oves circum ; nostri nee poenitet illas," 

and the flocks of Arcady that gather round in sympathy 
with the lovelorn Gallus' woe ? 
So, again, the well-known lines — 

" Not seldom, clad in radiant vest. 
Deceitfully goes forth the Morn ; 
Not seldom Evening in the west 
Sinks smilingly forsworn " — 



IX.] "LAODAMIA." 119 

are almost a translation of Palinurus' remonstrance with 
" the treachery of tranquil heaven." And when the poet 
wishes for any link which could bind him closer to the 
Highland maiden who has flitted across his path as a be- 
ing of a different world from his own — 

" Thine elder Brother would I be, 
Thy Father, anythiug to thee !" — 

w^e hear the echo of the sadder plaint — 

" Atqiie iitinam e vobis unus " — 

when the Roman statesman longs to be made one with the 

simple life of shepherd or husbandman, and to know their 

undistracted joy. 

Still more impressive is the shock of surprise with which 

we read in Wordsworth's poem on Ossian the following 

lines : 

" MuscGus, stationed with his lyre 

Supreme among the Elysian quire, 

Is, for the dwellers upon earth, 

Mute as a lark ere morning's birth," 

and perceive that he w-ho wrote them has entered — where 
no commentator could conduct him — into the solemn pa- 
thos of Virgil's Musccum ante omnis ; where the singer 
whose very existence upon earth has become a legend and 
a mythic name is seen keeping in the underworld his old 
pre-eminence, and towering above the blessed dead. 

This is a stage in AVordsworth's career on which his 
biographer is tempted unduly to linger. For we have 
reached the Indian summer of his genius; it can still 
shine at moments bright as ever, and with even a new 
majesty and calm ; but w^e feel, nevertheless, that the mel- 
ody is dying from his song ; that he is hardening into self- 
repetition, into rhetoric, into sermonizing common -place, 



120 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

and is rigid where he was once profound. The Thanks- 
giving Ode (1816) strikes death to the heart. The accus- 
tomed patriotic sentiments — the accustomed virtuous as- 
pirations — these are still there ; but the accent is like that 
of a ghost who calls to us in hollow mimicry of a voice 
that once we loved. 

And yet Wordsworth's poetic life was not to close with- 
out a great symbolical spectacle, a solemn farewell. Sun- 
set among the Cumbrian hills, often of remarkable beauty, 
once or twice, perhaps, in a score of years, reaches a pitch 
of illusion and mao-nificence which indeed seems nothing 
less than the commingling of earth and heaven. Such a 
sight — seen from Rydal Mount in 1818 — afforded once 
more the needed stimulus, and evoked that ^^ Evening Ode, 
composed on an evening of extraordinary splendour and 
hea'dty^'' which is the last considerable production of 
Wordsworth's genius. In this ode we recognize the pe- 
culiar gift of reproducing with magical simplicity, as it 
Avere, the inmost virtue of natural phenomena. 

" No sound is uttered, but a deep 

And solemn harmony pervades 
The hollow vale from steep to steep, 

And penetrates the glades. 
Far distant images draw nigh, 
Called forth by wondrous potency 
Of beamy radiance, that imbues 
Whate'er it strikes, with gem-like hues ! 

In vision exquisitely clear 
Herds range along the mountain side ; 
And glistening antlers are descried. 

And gilded flocks appear." 

Once more the poet brings home to us that sense of be- 
longing at once to two worlds, which gives to human life 
so much of mysterious solemnity. 



IX.] "EVENING ODE." 121 

" Wings at my shoulder seem to play ; 
But, rooted here, I stand and gaze 
On those bright steps that heavenward raise 
Their practicable way." 

And the poem ends — with a deep personal pathos — in 
an alhision, repeated from the Ode on ImmortaUUj, to the 
light which " lay about him in his infancy " — the light 

" Full early lost, and fruitlessly deplored ; 

Which at this moment, on my waking sight 
Appears to shine, by miracle restored ! 

My soul, though yet confined to earth, 
Rejoices in a second birth ; 
— 'Tis past, the visionary splendour fades ; 
And night approaches with her shades." 

For those to whom the mission of Wordsworth appears 
before all things as a religions one there is sometlnng sol- 
emn in the spectacle of the seer standing at the close of 
his own apocalypse, with the consciousness that the stif- 
fening brain would never permit him to drink again that 
overflowing sense of glory and revelation — never, till he 
should drink it new in the kingdom of God. He lived, in 
fact, through another generation of men, but the vision 
came to him no more ; 

"Or if some vestige of those gleams 
Survived, 'twas only in his dreams." 

We look on a man's life for the most part as forming 
in itself a completed drama. We love to see the interest 
maintained to the close, the pathos deepened at the de- 
parting hour. To die on the same day is the prayer of 
lovers ; to vanish at Trafalgar is the ideal of heroic souls. 
And yet — so wide and various are the issues of life — 
there is a solemnity as profound in a quite different lot ; 



122 WORDSWORTH. [chap. ix. 

for if we are moving among eternal emotions we should 
have time to bear Avitness that they are eternal. Even 
Love left desolate may feel with a proud triumph that it 
could never have rooted itself so immutably amid the joys 
of a visible return as it can do through the constancies of 
bereavement, and the life-long memory which is a life-long 
hope. And Vision, Revelation, Ecstasy — it is not only 
while these are kindling our way that we should speak of 
them to men, but rather when they have passed from us 
and left us only their record in our souls, whose perma- 
nence confirms the fiery finger which wrote it long ago. 
For as the Greeks would end the first drama of a trilogy 
with a hush of concentration, and with declining notes of 
calm, so to us the narrowing receptivity and persistent 
steadfastness of age suggest not only decay but expect- 
ancy, and not death so much as sleep ; or seem, as it 
were, the beginning of operations which are not measured 
by our hun*ying time, nor tested by any achievement to 
be accomplished here. 



CHAPTER X. 

NATURAL RELIGION. 

It will have been obvious from the preceding pages, as 
well as from the tone of other criticisms on Wordsworth, 
that his exponents are not content to treat his poems on 
nature simply as graceful descriptive pieces, but speak of 
him in terms usually reserved for the originators of some 
great religious movement. " The very image of Words- 
worth," says De Quincey, for instance, " as I prefigured it 
to my own planet-struck eye, crushed my faculties as be- 
fore Elijah or St. Paul." How was it that poems so sim- 
ple in outward form that the reviewers of the day classed 
them with the Song of Sixpence, or at best with the Babes 
in the Wood, could affect a critic like De Quincey — I do 
not say with admiration, but with this exceptional sense 
of revelation and awe ? 

The explanation of this anomaly lies, as is well known, 
in something new and individual in the way in which 
W^ordsworth regarded nature ; something more or less 
discernible in most of his works, and redeeming even 
some of the slightest of them from insignificance, while 
conferring on the more serious and sustained pieces an 
importance of a different order from that which attaches 
to even the most brilliant productions of his contempo- 
raries. To define with exactness, however, what was this 
6* 



124 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

new element imported by our poet into man's view of 
nature is far from easy, and requires some brief consider- 
ation of the attitude in this respect of his predecessors. 

There is so much in the external world which is terri- 
ble or unfriendly to man, that the first impression made on 
him by Nature as a whole, even in temperate climates, is 
usually that of awfulness ; his admiration being reserved 
for the fragments of her which he has utilized for his own 
purposes, or adorned with his own handiwork. When 
Homer tells us of a place 

" Where even a god might gaze, and stand apart, 
And feel a wondering rapture at the heart," 

it is of no prospect of sea or mountain that he is speak- 
ing, but of a garden where everything is planted in rows, 
and there is a never-ending succession of pears and figs. 
These gentler aspects of nature will have their minor 
deities to represent them ; but the men, of whatever race 
they be, whose minds are m.ost absorbed in the problems 
of man's position and destiny will tend for the most part 
to some sterner and more overwhelming conception of the 
sum of things. " Lord, what is man, that thou art mind- 
ful of him?" is the cry of Hebrew piety as well as of mod- 
ern science ; and the " majestas cognita rerum " — the rec- 
ognized majesty of the universe — teaches Lucretius only 
the indiiference of gods and the misery of men. 

But in a well-known passage, in which Lucretius is 
honoured as he deserves, we find, nevertheless, a different 
view hinted, with an impressiveness which it had hardly 
acquired till then. We find Virgil implying that scien- 
tific knowledge of Nature may not be the only way of 
arriving at the truth about her ; that her loveliness is also 
a revelation, and that the soul which is in unison with her 



x.j NATURAL RELIGION. 125 

is justified by its own peace. This is the very substance 
of The Poet's Epitaph also ; of the poem in which Words- 
worth at the beginning of his career describes himself as 
he continued till its close — the poet who " murmurs near 
the running brooks a music sweeter than their own" — 
who scorns the man of science " who would peep and 
botanize upon his mother's grave." 

*' The outward shows of sky and earth, 
Of hill and valley, he has viewed ; 
And impulses of deeper birth 
Have come to him in solitude. 

" In common things that round us lie 

Some random truths he can impart — * 

The harvest of a quiet eye 

That broods and sleeps on his own heart. 

*' But he is weak, both man and boy, 
Hath been an idler in the land ; 
Contented if he might enjoy 

The things which others understand." 

Like much else in the literature of imperial Rome, the 
passage in the second Georgic, to which I have referred, 
is in its essence more modern than the Middle Ages. 
Mediasval Christianity involved a divorce from the nature 
around us, as well as from the nature within. With the 
rise of the modern spirit delight in the external world re- 
turns ; and from Chaucer downwards through the whole 
course of English poetry are scattered indications of a 
mood which draws from visible things an intuition of 
things not seen. When Withers, in words which Words- 
worth has fondly quoted, says of his muse : 

" By the murmur of a spring, 
Or the least bough's rustelling : 



126 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

By a daisy whose leaves spread, 
Shut when Titan goes to bed ; 
Or a shady bush or tree — 
She could more infuse in me 
Than all Nature's beauties can 
In some other wiser man " — 

he felt already, as Wordswortli after liim, that Nature is no 
mere collection of phenomena, but infuses into her least 
approaches some sense of her mysterious whole. 

Passages like this, however, must not be too closely 
pressed. The mystic element in English literature has 
run for the most part into other channels ; and when, af- 
ter Pope's reigu of artificiality and convention, attention 
was redirected to the phenomena of Nature by Collins, 
Beattie, Thomson, Crabbe, Cowper, Burns, and Scott, it 
was in a spirit of admiring observation rather than of 
an intimate worship. Sometimes, as for the most part in 
Thomson, we have mere picturesqueness — a reproduction 
of Nature for the mere pleasure of reproducing her — a 
kind of stock-taking of her habitual effects. Or some- 
times, as in Burns, we have a glowing spirit which looks 
on Nature wdth a side glance, and uses her as an accessory 
to the expression of human love and woe. Cowper some- 
times contemplated her as a whole, but only as affording 
a proof of the wisdom and goodness of a personal Creator. 

To express what is characteristic in Wordsworth we 
must recur to a more generalized conception of the rela- 
tions between the natural and the spiritual worlds. We 
must say with Plato — the lawgiver of all subsequent ide- 
alists — that the unknown realities around us, which the 
philosopher apprehends by the contemplation of abstract 
truth, become in various ways obscurely perceptible to 
men under the influence of " divine madness " — of an 



X.] NATURAL RELIGION. VII 

enthusiasm which is in fact inspiration. And further, 
giving, as he so often does, a half - fanciful expression to 
a substance of deep meaning*, Plato distinguishes four 
kinds of this enthusiasm. There is the prophet's glow 
of revelation ; and the prevailing prayer which averts the 
wrath of heaven ; and that philosophy which enters, so to 
say. unawares into the poet through his art, and into the 
lover through his love. Each of these stimuli may so 
exalt the inward faculties as to make a man evBeoq kuI 
tKcppojy — " bereft of reason, but filled with divinity " — per- 
cipient of an intelligence other and larger than his own. 
To this list Wordsworth has made an important addition. 
He has shown by his example and writings that the con- 
templation of Nature may become a stimulus as inspiring 
as these; may enable us "to see into the life of things" 
— as far, perhaps, as beatific vision or prophetic rapture 
can attain. Assertions so impalpable as these must jus- 
tify themselves by subjective evidence. He who claims 
to give a message must satisfy us that he has himself re- 
ceived it ; and, inasmuch as transcendent things are in 
themselves inexpressible, he must convey to ns in hints 
and figures the conviction which w^e need. Prayer may 
bring the spiritual world near to us; but when the eyes 
of Ihe kneeling Dominic seem to say "/o son venuto a 
questo,^'' their look must persuade us that the life of wor- 
ship has indeed attained the reward of vision. Art, too, 
may be inspired ; but the artist, in whatever field lie 
works, must have " such a mastery of his mystery " that 
the fabric of his imagination stands visible in its own 
light before our eyes — 

" Seemg it is built 
Of music ; therefore never built at all, 
And therefore built for ever." 



128 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

Love may open lieaven ; but when the lover would invite 
lis " thither, where are the eyes of Beatrice," he must make 
us feel that his individual passion is indeed part and par- 
cel of that love " which moves the sun and the other stars." 
And so also with Wordsworth. Unless the words which 
describe the intense and sympathetic gaze with which he 
contemplates Nature convince us of the reality of " the 
light which never was on sea or land " — of the " Presence 
which disturbs him with the joy of elevated thoughts " — 
of the authentic vision of those hours 

" When the light of sense 
Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed 
The invisible world ;" 

unless his tone awakes a responsive conviction in our- 
selves, there is no argument by which he can prove to us 
that he is offering a new insight to mankind. Yet, on 
the other hand, it need not be unreasonable to see in his 
message something more than a mere individual fancy. 
It seems, at least, to be closely correlated with those oth- 
er messages of which Ave have spoken — those other cases 
where some original element of our nature is capable of 
being regarded as an inlet of mystic truth. For in each 
of these complex aspects of religion we see, perhaps, the 
modification of a primeval instinct. There is a point of 
view from which Revelation seems to be but transfigured 
Sorcery, and Love transfigured Appetite, and Philosophy 
man's ordered Wonder, and Prayer his softening Fear. 
And similarly, in the natural religion of Wordsworth we 
may discern the modified outcome of other human im- 
pulses hardly less universal — of those instincts which led 
our forefathei's to people earth and air with deities, or to 
vivify the whole universe with a single soul. In this view 



X.] NATURAL RELIGION. 129 

the acliievcment of Wordsworth was of a kind which most 
of the moral leaders of the race have in some way or other 
performed. It was that he turned a theology back again 
into a religion ; that he revived in a higher and purer form 
those primitive elements of reverence for Nature's powers 
which had diffused themselves into speculation, or crystal- 
lized into mythology ; that for a system of beliefs about 
Nature, which paganism had allowed to become grotesque 
— of rites which had become unmeaning — he substituted 
an admiration for Nature so constant, an understanding of 
her so subtle, a sympathy so profound, that they became 
a veritable worship. Such worship, I repeat, is not what 
we commonly imply either by paganism or by panthe- 
ism. For in pagan countries, though the gods may have 
originally represented natural forces, yet the conception of 
them soon becomes anthropomorphic, and they are rever- 
enced as transcendent men ; and, on the other hand, pan- 
theism is generally characterized by an indifference to 
things in the concrete, to Nature in detail ; so that the 
Whole, or Universe, with which the Stoics (for instance) 
sought to be in harmony, was approached not by contem- 
plating external objects, but rather by ignoring them. 

Yet here I would be understood to speak only in the 
most general manner. So congruous in all ages are the 
aspirations and the hopes of men that it would be rash 
indeed to attempt to assign the moment when any spirit- 
ual truth rises for the first time on human consciousness. 
But thus much, I think, may be fairly said, that the max- 
ims of Wordsworth's form of natural religion were uttered 
before Wordsworth only in the sense in which the maxims 
of Christianity were uttered before Christ. To compare 
small things with great — or, rather, to compare great things 
with things vastly greater — the essential spirit of the Lhus 



130. WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

near Tintern Abbey was for practical purposes as new to 
mankind as tlie essential spirit of the Sermon on the 
Mount. Not the isolated expression of moral ideas, but 
their fusion into a whole in one memorable personality, 
is that which connects them forever with a single name. 
Therefore it is that Wordsworth is venerated ; because to 
so many men — indifferent, it may be, to literary or poet- 
ical effects, as such — he has shown by the subtle intensity 
of his own emotion how the contemplation of Nature can 
be made a revealing agency, like Love or Prayer — an open- 
ing, if indeed there be any opening, into the transcendent 
world. 

The prophet with such a message as this will, of course, 
appeal for the most part to the experience of exception- 
al moments — those moments when " we see into the life 
of things ;" when the face of Nature sends to us " gleams 
like the flashing of a shield " — hours such as those of the 
Solitary, who, gazing on the lovely distant scene, 

"Would gaze till it became 
Far lovelier, and his heart could not sustain 
The beauty, still more beauteous," 

But the idealist, of whatever school, is seldom content 
to base his appeal to us upon these scattered intuitions 
alone. There is a whole epoch of our existence whose 
memories, differing, indeed, immensely in vividness and 
importance in the minds of different men, are yet suffi- 
ciently common to all men to form a favourite basis for 
philosophical argument. " The child is father of the 
man ;" and through the recollection and observation of 
early childhood we may hope to trace our ancestry — in 
heaven above or on the earth beneath — in its most signifi- 
cant manifestation. 



X.] NATURAL KELIGIOxY. 131 

It is to the workings of the mind of the child that the 
philosopher appeals who wishes to prove tliat knowledge 
is recollection, and that our recognition of geometrical 
truths — so prompt as to appear instinctive — depends on 
our having been actually familiar with them in an earlier 
world. The Christian mystic invokes with equal confi- 
dence liis own memories of a state which seemed as yet to 
know no sin : 

" Happy those early days, when I 
Shined in my angel infancy ! 
Before I understood this place 
Appointed for my second race, 
Or taught my soul to fancy aught 
But a white, celestial thought ; 
When yet I had not walked above 
A mile or two from my first Love, 
And, looking back at that short space, 
Could see a glimpse of His bright face ; 
When on some gilded cloud or flower 
My gazing soul would dwell an hour, 
And in those weaker glories spy 
Some shadows of eternity ; 
Before I taught my tongue to wound 
My conscience with a sinful sound. 
Or had the black art to dispense 
A several sin to every sense, 
But felt through all this fleshly dress 
Bright shoots of everlastingness." 

And Wordsworth, whose recollections were exceptional- 
ly vivid, and whose, introspection was exceptionally pene- 
trating, has drawn from his own childish memories philo- 
sophical lessons which are hard to disentangle in a logical 
statement, but which will roughly admit of being classed 
under two heads. For, firstly, he has shown an unusual 
delicacy of analysis in eliciting the " firstborn aflSnities that 



132 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

fit our new existence to existing tilings " — in tracing the 
first impact of impressions wliicli are destined to give the 
mind its earliest ply, or even, in unreflecting natures, to de- 
termine the permanent modes of thought. And, secondly, 
from the halo of pure and vivid emotions with which our 
childish years are surrounded, and the close connexion of 
this emotion with external nature, which it glorifies and 
transforms, he infers that the soul has enjoyed elsewhere 
an existence superior to that of earth, but an existence of 
which external nature retains for a time the power of re- 
minding her. 

The first of these lines of thought may be illustrated by 
a passage in the Prelude, in which the boy's mind is repre- 
sented as passing through precisely the train of emotion 
which we may imagine to be at the root of the theology 
of many barbarous peoples. He is rowing at night alone 
on Esthwaite Lake, his eyes fixed upon a ridge of crags, 
above which nothing is visible : 

" I dipped my oars into the silent lake, 
And as I rose upon the stroke my boat 
Went heaving through the water like a swan ; 
When, from behind that craggy steep till then 
The horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge, 
As if with voluntary power instinct 
Upreared its head. I struck and struck again ; 
And, growing still in stature, the grim shape 
Towered up between me and the stars, and still, 
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own, 
And measured motion like a living thing, 
Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned, 
And through the silent water stole my way 
Back to the covert of the willow-tree ; 
There in her mooring-place I left my bark, 
And through the meadows homeward went, in grave 
And serious mood. But after I had seen 



X.] NATURAL RELIGION. 133 

That spectacle, for many days, my brain 
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense 
Of unknown modes of being ; o'er my thoughts 
There hung a darkness — call it solitude, 
Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes 
Remained, no pleasant images of trees, 
Of sea, or sky, no colours of green fields ; 
But huge and miglity forms, that do not live 
Like living men, moved slowly thro' the mind 
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams." 

In tlie controversy as to the origin of the worship of 
inanimate objects, or of the powers of Nature, this passage 
might fairly be cited as an example of the manner in which 
those objects, or those powers, can impress the mind with 
that awe which is the foundation of savage creeds, while 
yet they are not identified with any human intelligence, 
such as the spirits of ancestors or the like, nor even sup- 
posed to operate according to any human analogy. 

Up to this point Wordsworth's reminiscences may seem 
simply to illustrate the conclusions which science reaches 
by other roads. But he is not content with merely record- 
ing and analyzing his childish impressions ; he implies, or 
even asserts, that these " fancies from afar are brought" — 
that the child's view of the world reveals to him truths 
which the man with difficulty retains or recovers. This is 
not the usual teaching of science, yet it would be hard to 
assert that it is absolutely impossible. The child's instincts 
may well be supposed to partake in larger measure of the 
general instincts of the race, in smaller measure of the 
special instincts of his own country and century, than is 
the case with the man. Now the feelings and beliefs of 
each successive century will probably be, on the Avhole, 
superior to those of any previous century. But this is 
not universally true ; the teaching of each generation does 



134 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

not thus sum up the results of the whole past. And thus 
the child, to whom in a certain sense the past of humanity 
is present — who is living through the whole life of the 
race in little, before he lives the life of his century in large 
— may possibly dimly apprehend something more of truth 
in certain directions than is visible to the adults around 
him. 

But, thus qualified, the intuitions of infancy misfht seem 
scarcely worth insisting on. And Wordsworth, as is well 
known, has followed Plato in advancing for the child a 
much bolder claim. The child's soul, in this view, has ex- 
isted before it "entered the body — has existed in a world 
superior to ours, but connected, by tlie immanence of the 
same pervading Spirit, with the material universe before 
our eyes. The child begins by feeling this material world 
strange to him. But he sees in it, as it were, what he has 
been accustomed to see ; he discerns in it its kinship with 
the spiritual world which he dimly remembers; it is to 
him " an unsubstantial fairy place " — a scene at once bright- 
er and more unreal than it will appear in his eyes when he 
has become acclimatized to earth. And even when this 
freshness of insight has passed away, it occasionally hap- 
pens that sights or sounds of unusual beauty or carrying 
deep associations — a rainbow, a cuckoo's cay, a sunset of 
extraordinary splendour — will renew for a while this sense 
of vision and nearness to the spiritual world — a sense 
which never loses its reality, though with advancing years 
its presence grows briefer and more rare. 

Such then, in prosaic statement, is the most characteristic 
message of Wordsworth. And it is to be noted that though 
Wordsworth at times presents it as a coherent theory, yet 
it is not necessarily of the nature of a theory, nor need be 
accepted or rejected as a whole ; but is rather an inlet of 



X.] NATURAL RELIGION. 135 

illamining emotion in -wliicli different minds can share in 
the measure of their capacities or their need. There are 
some to whom childhood brought no strange vision of 
brightness, but who can feel their communion with the 
Divinity in Nature growing with the growth of their souls. 
There are others who might be unwilling to acknowledge 
any spiritual or transcendent source for the elevating joy 
which the contemplation of Nature can give, but who feel, 
nevertheless, that to that joy Wordsworth has been their 
most effective guide. A striking illustration of this fact 
may be drawn from the passage in which John Stuart Mill, 
a philosopher of a very different school, has recorded the 
influence exercised over him by Wordsworth's poems, read 
In a season of dejection, when there seemed to be no real 
and substantive joy in life, nothing but the excitement of 
the struggle with the hardships and injustices of human 
fates. 

"What made Wordsworth's poems a medicine for my state of 
mind," he says, in his Autobiography, " was that they expressed, not 
mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured 
by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the 
very culture of the feelings which I was in quest of. In them I 
seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and im- 
aginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings, 
Avhich had no connexion Avith struggle or imperfection, but would be 
made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition 
of mankind. From them I seemed to learn what would be the peren- 
nial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of life shall have 
been removed. And I felt myself at once better and happier as I 
came under their influence." 

Words like these, proceeding from a mind so different 
from the poet's own, form perhaps as satisfactory a testi- 
mony to the value of liis work as any writer can obtain : 



136 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

for they imply that Wordsworth has succeeded in giving 
his own impress to emotions which may become common 
to all ; that he has produced a body of thought which is 
felt to be both distinctive and coherent, while yet it en- 
larges the reader's capacities instead of making demands 
upon his credence. Whether there be theories, they shall 
pass ; whether there be systems, they shall fail ; the true 
epoch-maker in the history of the human soul is the man 
who educes from this bewildering universe a new and ele- 
vating joy. 

I have alluded above to some of the passages, most of 
them familiar enough, in which Wordsworth's sense of 
the mystic relation between the world without us and the 
world within — the correspondence between the seen and 
the unseen — is expressed in its most general terms. But 
it is evident that such a conviction as this, if it contain any 
truth, cannot be barren of consequences on any level of 
thought. The communion with Nature which is capable 
of being at times sublimed to an incommunicable ecstasy 
must be capable also of explaining Nature to us so far as 
she can be explained ; there must be axiomata media of 
natural religion ; there must be something in the nature 
of poetic truths, standing midway between mystic intuition 
and delicate observation. 

How rich Wordsworth is in these poetic truths — how 
illumining is the gaze which he turns on the commonest 
phenomena — how subtly and variously he shows us the 
soul's innate perceptions or inherited memories, as it were, 
co-operating with Nature and " half creating" the voice 
with which she speaks — all this can be learnt by attentive 
study alone. Only a few scattered samples can be given 
here ; and I will begin with one on whose significance 
the poet has himself dwelt. This is the poem called The 



X.] NATURAL RELIGION. 137 

Leech- Gatherer, afterwards more formally named Resolu- 
tion and Independence. 

" I will explain to you," says Wordsworth, " in prose, 
my feelings in writing that poem. I describe myself as 
having been exalted to the highest pitch of delight by the 
joyousness and beauty of Nature; and then as depressed, 
even in the midst of those beautiful objects, to the lowest 
dejection and despair. A young poet in the midst of the 
happiness of Nature is described as overwhelmed by the 
thoughts of the miserable reverses which have befallen the 
happiest of all men, viz., poets. I think of this till I am 
so deeply impressed with it, that I consider the manner in 
which I am rescued from my dejection and despair almost 
as an interposition of Providence. A person reading the 
poem with feelings like mine will have been awed and 
controlled, expecting something spiritual or supernatural. 
AVhat is brought forward ? A lonely place, ' a pond, by 
which an old man ims, far from all house or hom.e :' not 
stood, nor sat, but ims — the figure presented in the most 
naked simplicity possible. The feeling of spirituality or 
supernaturalness is again referred to as being strong in my 
mind in this passage. How came he here ? thought I, or 
what can he be doing? I then describe him, whether ill 
or well is not for me to judge with perfect confidence; 
but this I can confidently affirm, that though I believe 
God has given me a strong imagination, I cannot conceive 
a figure more impressive than that of an old man like this, 
the survivor of a wife and ten children, travelling alone 
among the mountains and all lonely places, carrying with 
him his own fortitude, and the necessities which an unjust 
state of society has laid upon him. You speak of his 
speech as tedious. Everything is tedious when one does 
not read with the feelino-s of the author. The Thorn is 



138 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

tedious to hundreds ; and so is The Idiot Boy to hundreds. 
It is in the character of the old man to tell his story, which 
an impatient reader must feel tedious. But, good heav- 
ens ! such a fio-ure, in such a place ; a pious, self-respecting, 
miserably infirm and pleased old man, telling such a tale !" 

The naive earnestness of this passage suggests to us 
how constantly recurrent in Wordsworth's mind were the 
two trains of ideas which form the substance of the poem ; 
the interaction, namely (if so it may be termed), of the 
moods of Nature with the moods of the human mind; 
and the dignity and interest of man as man, depicted with 
no complex background of social or political life, but set 
amid the primary affections and sorrows, and the wild 
aspects of the external world. 

Among the pictures which Wordsworth has left us of 
the influence of Nature on human character, Peter Bell 
may be taken as marking one end, and the poems on Lucy 
the othcT end of the scale. Peter Bell lives in the face 
of Nature untouched alike by her terror and her charm ; 
Lucy's whole being is moulded by Nature's self; she is 
responsive to sun and shadow, to silence and to sound, 
and melts almost into an impersonation of a Cumbrian 
valley's peace. Between these two extremes how many 
are the possible shades of feeling ! In Ruth^ for instance, 
the point impressed upon us is that Nature's influence is 
only salutary so long as she is herself, so to say, in keeping 
with man ; that when her operations reach that degree of 
habitual energy and splendour at which our love for her 
passes into fascination and our admiration into bewilder- 
ment, then the fierce and irregular stimulus consorts no 
longer with the growth of a temperate virtue : 

" The wind, the tempest roaring high, 
The tumult of a tropic sky, 



X.] NATURAL RELIGION. 139 

Might well be dangerous food 
For liim, a youth to whom was given 
So much of earth, so much of heaven, 

And such impetuous blood." 

And a contrasting touch recalls the healing power of 
those gentle and familiar presences which carae to Ruth 
in her stormy madness with visitations of momentary 

calm : 

" Yet sometimes milder hours she knew, 
Nor wanted sun, nor rain, nor dew, 

Nor pastimes of the May ; 
They all were with her in her cell ; 
And a wild brook with cheerful knell 
Did o'er the pebbles play." 

I will give one other instance of this subtle method of 
dealing with the contrasts in nature. It is from the poem 
entitled ^^ Lines left upon a Seat in a Yeiv-Tree which 
stands near the Lake of LJsthwaite, on a desolate part of 
the Shore, commanding a beautiful Prospect.^^ This seat 
was once the haunt of a lonely, a disappointed, an em- 
bittered man. 

"Stranger! these gloomy boughs 
Had charms for him ; and here he loved to sit. 
His only visitants a straggling sheep. 
The stone-chat, or the glancing sand-piper ; 
And on these barren rocks, with fern and heath 
And juniper and thistle sprinkled o'er. 
Fixing his downcast eye, he many an hour 
A morbid pleasure nourished, tracing here 
~ An emblem of his own unfruitful life ; 

And, lifting up his head, he then would gaze 
On the more distant scene — how lovely 'tis 
Thou seest— and he would gaze till it became 
Far lovelier, and his heart could not contain 
The beauty, still more beauteous ! Nor, that time, 
1 



140 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

When Nature had subdued him to herself, 
Would he forget those beings, to whose minds, 
Warm from the labours of benevolence. 
The world, and human life, appeared a scene 
Of kindred loveliness ; then he would sigh 
With mournful joy, to think that others felt 
AVhat he must never feel : and so, lost Man ! 
On visionary views would fancy feed 
Till his eyes streamed with tears," 

This is one of the passages whicli the lover of Wovds- 
woi'tli quotes, perhaps, with some apprehension ; not know- 
ing how far it carries into the hearts of others its affect- 
ing power ; how vividly it calls up before them that mood 
of desolate loneliness when the whole vision of human 
love and joy hangs like a mirage in the air, and only when 
it seems irrecoverably distant seems also intolerably dear. 
But, however this particular passage may impress the 
reader, it is not hard to illustrate by abundant references 
the potent originality of Wordsworth's outlook on the 
external world. 

There was indeed no aspect of nature, however often 
depicted, in which his seeing eye could not discern some 
unnoted quality ; there was no mood to which nature 
gave birth in the mind of man from which his meditation 
could not disengage some element which threw light on 
our inner being. How often has the approach of evening 
been described! and how mysterious is its solemnizing 
power ! Yet it was reserved for Wordsworth, in his son- 
net " Hail, Twilight, sovereign of one peaceful hour," to 
draw out a characteristic of that grey waning light which 
half explains to us its sombre and pervading charm. 
" Day's mutable distinctions " pass away ; all in the land- 
scape that suggests our own age or our own handiwork is 
gone ; we look on the sight seen by our remote ancestors, 



X.] NATURAL RELIGION. 141 

and the visible present is generalized into an immeasu- 
rable past. 

The sonnet on the Duddon beginning "What aspect 
bore the Man who roved or fled First of his tribe to this 
dark dell ?" carries back the mind along the same track, 
with the added thought of Nature's permanent gentleness 
amid the " hideous usages " of primeval man— through all 
which the stream's voice was innocent, and its flow benign. 
" A weight of awe not easy to be borne " fell on the poet, 
also, as he looked on the earliest memorials which these 
remote ancestors have left us. The Sonnet on a Stone- 
Circle which opens with these words is conceived in a 
strain of emotion never more needed than now — when 
Abury itself owes its preservation to the munificence of 
a private individual — when stone -circle or round- tower, 
camp or dolmen, are destroyed to save a few shillings, and 
occupation-roads are mended with the immemorial altars 
of an unknown God. "Speak, Giant -mother! tell it to 
the Morn !" — how strongly does the heart re-echo the sol- 
emn invocation which calls on those abiding witnesses to 
speak once of what they knew long ago ! 

The mention of these ancient worships may lead us to 
ask in what manner Wordsworth was affected by the Nat- 
ure-deities of Greece and Rome — impersonations which 
have preserved through so many ages so strange a charm. 
And space must be found here for the characteristic son- 
net in which the baseness and materialism of modern life 
drives him back on whatsoever of illumination and reality 
lay in that young ideal. 

" The world is too much with us ; late and soon, 
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers ; 
Little we see in Nature that is ours ; 
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon ! 



142 WOKDSWORTII. [chap. 

The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon ; 

The Winds that will be howling at all hours, 

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers ; 
For this, for everything we are out of tune ; 
It moves us not. Great God ! I'd rather be 

A pagan suckled in a creed outworn ; 
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn ; 
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea : 

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." 

Wordsworth's own imagination idealized Nature in a 
different way. The sonnet "Brook! whose society the 
poet seeks " places him among the men whose Nature-dei- 
ties have not yet become anthropomorphic — men to whom 
" unknown modes of being " may seem more lovely as 
well as more awful than the life we know. He would not 
give to his idealized brook " human cheeks, channels for 
tears — no Naiad shouldst thou be " — 

" It seems the Eternal Soul is clothed in thee 
With purer robes than those of flesh and blood, 
And hath bestowed on thee a better good ; 
Unwearied joy, and life without its cares." 

And in the Sonnet on Calais Beach the sea is regarded in 
the same way, with a sympathy (if I may so say) which 
needs no help from an imaginary impersonation, but 
strikes back to a sense of kinship which seems antecedent 
to the origin of man. 

"It is a beauteous Evening, calm and free ; 
The holy time is quiet as a Nun 
Breathless Avith adoration ; the broad sun 

Is sinking down in its tranquillity ; 

The gentleness of heaven is on the Sea : 
Listen ! the mighty Being is awake. 
And doth with his eternal motion make 

A sound like thunder — everlastingly." 



X.] NATURAL RELIGIOX. 143 

A comparison, made by Wordswortli Liinself, of his 
own method of observing Nature with Scott's expresses in 
less mystical language something of Avhat I am endeavour- 
ing to say. 

" lie expatiated much to me one day," says Mr. Aubrey de Vere, 
*' as we walked among the hills above Grasraere, on the mode in 
which Nature had been described by one of the most justly popular 
of England's modern poets — one for whom he preserved a high and 
affectionate respect, ' He took pains,' Wordsworth said ; ' he went 
out with his pencil and note-book, and Jotted down whatever struck 
him most — a river rippling over the sands, a ruined tower on a rock 
above it, a promontory, and a mountain-ash waving its red berries. 
He went home and wove the whole together into a poetical descrip- 
tion.' After a pause, Wordsworth resumed, with a flashing eye and 
impassioned voice : ' But Nature does not permit an inventory to be 
made of her charms ! He should have left his pencil and note-book 
at home, fixed his eye as he walked with a reverent attention on all 
that surrounded him, and taken all into a heart that could under- 
stand and enjoy. Then, after several days had passed by, he should 
have interrogated his memory as to the scene. He would have dis- 
covered that, while much of what he had admired was preserved to 
him, much was also most wisely obliterated ; that which remained — 
the picture surviving in his mind — would have presented the ideal 
and essential truth of the scene, and done so in a large part by dis- 
carding much which, though in itself striking, was not cnaracteristic. 
In every scene many of the most brilliant details are but accidental ; 
a true eye for Nature does not note them, or at least does not dwell 
on them.' " 

How many a phrase of Wordsworth's rises in the mind 
in illustration of this power ! phrases which embody in a 
single picture, or a single image — it may be the vivid 
wildness of the flowery coppice, of 

" Flaunting summer, when he throws 
His soul into the briar-rose " — 

or the melancholy stillness of the declining year — 



114 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

" Where floats 
O'er twilight fields the autumnal gossamer ;" 

or, as in the words which to the sensitive Charles Lamb 
seemed too terrible for art, the irresponsive blankness of 
the universe — 

" The broad open eye of the solitary sky " — 

beneath which mortal hearts must make what merriment 
they may. 

Or take those typical stanzas in Peter Bell, which so 
long were accounted among Wordsworth's leading absurd- 
ities. 

" In vain through every changeful year 
Did Nature lead him as before ; 
A primrose by the river's brim 
A yellow primrose was to him, 
And it was nothing more. 

" In vain, througli water, earth, and air, 
The soul of happy sound was spread, 
When Peter, on some April morn. 
Beneath the broom or budding thorn, 
Made the warm earth his lazy bed. 

"At noon, when by the forest's edge 
He lay beneath the branches high, 

The soft blue sky did never melt 

Into his heart — he never felt 
The witchery of the soft blue sky ! 

" On a fair prospect some have looked 

And felt, as I have heard them say. 
As if the moving time had been 
A thing as steadfast as the scene 

On which they gazed themselves away." 

In all these passages, it will be observed, the emotion is 
educed from Nature rather than added to her: she is 



X.] NATURAL RELIGION. 145 

treated as a mystic text to be dccipbered, rather tlian as a 
stimulus to roving imagination. This latter mood, indeed, 
Wordsworth feels occasionally, as in the sonnet where 
the woodland sights become to him " like a dream of the 
whole world ;" but it is checked by the recurring sense 
that "it is our business to idealize the real, and not to 
realize the ideal." Absorbed in admiration of fantastic 
clouds of sunset, he feels for a moment ashamed to think 
that they are unrememberable — 

" They are of the sk}', 
And from our earthly memory fade away." 

But soon he disclaims this regret, and reasserts the para- 
mount interest of the things that we can grasp and love : 

" Grove, isle, with every shape of sky-built dome, 
Though clad in colours beautiful and pure, 
Find in the heart of man no natural home : 
The immortal Mind craves objects that endure : 
These cleave to it ; from these it cannot roam, 
Nor they from it : their fellowship is secure." 

From this temper of Wordsworth's mind, it follows that 
there will be many moods in which we shall not retain 
him as our companion. Moods which are rebellious, which 
beat at the bars of fate ; moods of passion reckless in its 
vehemence, and assuming the primacy of all other emo- 
tions through the intensity of its delight or pain ; moods 
of mere imaginative phantasy, when we w^ould fain shape 
from the well-worn materials of our thought some fabric 
at once beautiful and new ; from all such phases of our in- 
ward being AVordsworth stands aloof. His poem on the 
nightingale and the stock-dove illustrates Avith half-con- 
scious allegory the contrast between himself and certain 
other poets. 



146 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

> " Nightingale ! tliou surely art 

A creature of a fiery heart ; 
These notes of thine — they pierce and pierce ; 
Tumultuous harmony and fierce ! 
Thou sing'st as if the God of wine 
Had helped thee to a Valentine ; 
A song in mockery and despite 
Of shades, and dews, and silent Night ; 
And steady bliss, and all the loves 
Now sleeping in their peaceful groves, 

" I heard a Stock-dove sing or say 
His homely tale, this very day ; 
His voice was buried among trees. 
Yet to be come at by the breeze : 
He did not cease ; but cooed — and cooed, 
And somewhat pensively he wooed. 
He sang of love with quiet blending. 
Slow to begin, and never ending ; 
Of serious faith and inward glee ; 
That was the Song — the Song for me !" 

" His voice ivas buried among trees,'''' says Wordsworth ; 
"a metaphor expressing the love of seclusion by which 
this bird is marked ; and characterizing its note as not 
partaking of the shrill and the piercing, and therefore 
more easily deadened by the intervening shade ; yet a note 
so peculiar, and withal so pleasing, that the breeze, gifted 
with that love of the sound which the poet feels, pene- 
trates the shade in which it is entombed, and conveys it 
to the ear of the listener." 

Wordsworth's poetry on the emotional side (as dis- 
tinguished from its mystical or its patriotic aspects) could 
hardly be more exactly described than in the above sen- 
tence. For while there are few poems of his which could 
be read to a mixed audience with the certainty of pro- 



X.] NATURAL RELlGIOxV. 14*7 

ducing an immediate impression ; yet, on tlio other hand, 
all the best ones gain in an unusual degree by repeated 
study ; and this is especially the case with those in which 
some touch of tenderness is enshrined in a scene of beau- 
ty, which it seems to interpret, while it is itself exalted 
by it. Such a poem is Stei^ping Westward, where the 
sense of sudden fellowship, and the quaint greeting be- 
neath the glowing sky, seem to link man's momentary 
wanderings with the cosmic spectacles of heaven. Such 
are the lines where all the wild romance of Highland 
scenery, the forlornness of the solitary vales, pours itself 
through the lips of the maiden singing at her work, " as 
if her song could have no ending " — 

" Alone she cuts and binds the grain, 
And sings a melancholy strain ; 
hsten ! for the Vale profound 
Is overflowing with the sound." 

Such — and with how subtle a difference ! — is the Frag- 
ment in which a " Spirit of noonday " wears on his face 
the silent joy of Nature in her own recesses, undisturbed 
by beast, or bird, or man — 

" Nor ever was a cloudless sky 
So steady or so fair." 

And such are the poems — We are Seven, The Pet Lamh^ 

^ The l\t Lamb is probably the only poem of Wordsworth's 
which can be charged with having done moral injury, and that to a 
single individual alone. "Barbara Lewthwaite," says Wordsworth, 
in 1843, " was not, in fact, the child whom I had seen and overheard 
as engaged in the poem. I chose the name for reasons implied in 
the above " (^. e., an account of her remarkable beauty), " and will 
here add a caution against the use of names of living persons. 
Within a few months after the publication of this poem I was much 
surprised, and more hurt, to find it in a child's school-book, which, 



148 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

Louisa, The Two April Mornings — in which the beauty 
of rustic children melts, as it were, into Nature herself, 

and the 

" Blooming girl whose hair was wet 
With points of morning dew " 

becomes the impersonation of the season's early joy. We 
may apply, indeed, to all these girls Wordsworth's de- 
scription of leverets playing on a lawn, and call them — 

" Separate creatures in their several gifts 
Abounding, but so fashioned that in all 
That Nature prompts them to display, their looks, 
Their starts of motion and their fits of rest, 
An undistinguishable style appears 
And character of gladness, as if Spring 
Lodged in their innocent bosoms, and the spirit 
Of the rejoicing Morning were their own." 

Mj limits forbid me to dwell longer on these points. 
The passages which I have been citing have been for the 
most part selected as illustrating the novelty and subtlety 
of Wordsworth's view of nature. But it will now be suf- 
ficiently clear how continually a strain of human interest 
is interwoven with the delight derived from impersonal 
things. 

"Long have I loved what I behold. 

The night that calms, the day that cheers : 

The common growth of mother earth 

Suffices me — her tears, her mirth. 

Her humblest mirth and tears." 

having been compiled by Lindley Murray, had come into use at 
Grasmere School, where Barbara was a pupil. And, alas, I had the 
mortification of hearing that she was very vain of being thus dis- 
tinguished ; and in after-life she used to say that she remembered 
the incident, and what I said to her upon the occasion," 



X.] NATURAL KELIGION. H9 

The poet of the Wa[/[/one}' — \\ho, himself a habitual 
water-drinker, has so glowingly described the glorification 
which the prospect of nature receives in a half-intoxicated 
brain— may justly claim that he can enter into all genuine 
pleasures, even of an order which he declines for himself. 
With anything that is false or artificial he cannot sympa- 
thize, nor with such faults as baseness, cruelty, rancour, 
which seem contrary to human nature itself ; but in deal- 
ino- with faults of mere iveakness he is far less strait-laced 
than many less virtuous men. 

He had, in fact, a reverence for human beings as such, 
which enabled him to face even their frailties without 
alienation; and there was something in his own happy 
exemption from such falls which touched him into regard- 
ing men less fortunate rather with pity than disdain : 

" Because the unstained, the clear, the crystalline, 
Have ever in them soraethhig of benign." 

His comment on Burns's Tam o' Shanter will perhaps 
surprise some readers who are accustomed to think of him 
only in his didactic attitude. 

"It is the privilege of poetic genius," he says, "to catch, under 
certain restrictions of which, perhaps, at the time of its being exerted 
it is but dimly conscious, a spirit of pleasure wherever it can be found, 
in the walks of nature, and in the business of men. The poet, trust- 
ing to primary instincts, luxuriates among the felicities of love and 
wine, and is enraptured while he describes the fairer aspects of war, 
nor does he shrink from the company of the passion of love, though 
immoderate— from convivial pleasures, though intemperate — nor from 
the presence of war, though savage, and recognized as the handmaid 
of desolation. Frequently and admirably has Burns given way to 
these impulses of nature, both with reference to himself and in de- 
scribing the condition of others. Who, but some impenetrable dunce 
or narrow-minded puritan in works of art, ever read without deliglit 



150 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

the picture which he has drawn of the convivial exultation of the 
rustic adventurer, Tarn o' Shanter ? The poet fears not to tell the 
reader in the outset that his hero was a desperate and sottish drunk- 
ard, whose excesses were as frequent as his opportunities. This 
reprobate sits down to his cups while the storm is roaring, and 
heaven and earth are in confusion; the night is driven on by song 
and tumultuous noise, laughter and jest thicken as the beverage im- 
proves upon the palate — conjugal fidelity archly bends to the service 
of general benevolence — selfishness is not absent, but wearing the 
mask of social cordiality ; and while these various elements of hu- 
manity are blended into one proud and happy composition of elated 
spirits, the anger of the tempest without doors only heightens and 
sets off the enjoyment within. I pity him who cannot perceive that 
in all this, though there was no moral purpose, there is a moral 
effect. 

" ' Kings may be blest, but Tam was glorious, 
O'er a' the ills of life victorious.' 

What a lesson do these words convey of charitable indulgence for 
the vicious habits of the principal actor in the scene, and of those 
who resemble him ! Men who to the rigidly virtuous are objects al- 
most of loathing, and whom therefore they cannot serve ! The poet, 
penetrating the unsightly and disgusting surfaces of things, has un- 
veiled with exquisite skill the finer ties of imagination and feeling, 
that often bind these beings to practices productive of so much un- 
happiness to themselves, and to those whom it is their duty to cher- 
ish ; and, as far as he puts the reader into possession of this intel- 
ligent sympathy, he qualifies him for exercising a salutary influence 
over the minds of those who are thus deplorably enslaved." 

The reverence for man as man, tlie sympathy for him 
,in his primary relations and liis essential being, of whicli 
these comments on Tam o' Shanter form so remarkable 
an example, is a habit of thought too ingrained in all 
AVordsworth's works to call for specific illustration. The 
figures of Michael, of Matthew, of the Brothers, of the 
hero of the Excursion, and even of the Idiot Boy, suggest 
themselves at once in this connexion. But it should be 



X.] NATURAL RELIGION. 161 

noted in each case liow free is the poet's view from any 
idealization of the poorer classes as such, from the ascrip- 
tion of imaginary merits to an unknown populace which 
forms the staple of so much revolutionary eloquence. 
These poems, while they form the most convincing rebuke 
to the exclusive pride of the rich and great, are also a 
stern and strenuous incentive to the obscure and lowly. 
They are pictures of the poor man's life as it is — pictures 
as free as Crabbe's from the illusion of sentiment — but in 
which the delight of mere observation (which in Crabbe 
predominates) is subordinated to an intense sympathy with 
all such capacities of nobleness and tenderness as are called 
out by the stress and pressure of penury or woe. They 
form for the folk of northern England (as the works of 
Burns and Scott for the Scottish folk) a gallery of figures 
that are modelled, as it were, both from without and from 
within ; by one with experience so personal as to keep 
every sentence vividly accurate, and yet with an insight 
which could draw from that simple life lessons to itself 
unknown. AVe may almost venture to generalize our 
statement further, and to assert that no writer since Shak- 
speare has left us so true a picture of the British nation. 
In Milton, indeed, we have the characteristic English spirit 
at a whiter glow; but it is the spirit of the scholar only, 
or of the ruler, not of the peasant, the woman, or the child. 
Wordsworth gives us that spirit as it is dijffused among 
shepherds and husbandmen — as it exists in obscurity and 
at peace. And they who know what makes the strength 
of nations need wish nothing better than that the tem- 
per wdiich he saw and honoured among the Cumbrian 
dales should be the temper of all England, now and for 
ever. 

Our discussion of Wordsworth's form of Natural Relio-ion 



152 WORDSWORTH. [chap. x. 

has led us back by no forced transition to the simple life 
Avliich he described and shared. I return to the story of 
his later years — if that be called a story which derives no 
interest from incident or passion, and dwells only on the 
slow broodiuij-s of a meditative souh 



CHAPTER XL 

ITALIAN TOUR. ECCLESIASTICAL SONNETS. POLITICAL 

VIEWS. LAUREATESHIP. 

Wordsworth was fond of travelling, and indulged this 
taste whenever lie could afford it. Comparing liiuiself and 
Soutbey, he says in 1843: "My lamented friend Southey 
used to say that, had lie been a Papist, the course of life 
which in all probability would have been his was that of 
a Benedictine monk, in a convent furnished with an inex- 
haustible library. Books were, in fact, his passion ; and 
ivauderlnr/, I can with truth affirm, was mine; but this 
propensity in me was happily counteracted by inability 
from want of fortune to fulfil my wishes." We find him, 
however, frequently able to contrive a change of scene. 
His Swiss tour in 1790, his residence in France in 1791-2, 
his residence in Germany, 1798-9, have been already 
touched on. Then came a short visit to France in August, 
1802, which produced the sonnets on Westminster Bridge, 
and Calais Beach. The tour in Scotland which was so 
fertile in poetry took place in 1803. A second tour in 
Scotland, in 1814, produced the Brownie's Cell and a few 
other pieces. And in July, 1820, he set out with his wife 
and sister and two or throe other friends for a tour through 
Switzerland and Italy. 

This tour produced a good deal of poetry ; and here and 



154 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

there are touclies whicli recall tlie old inspiration. Such 
is the comparison of the clouds about the Engelberg to 
hovering angels ; and such the description of the eclipse 
falling upon the population of statues which throng the 
pinnacles of Milan Cathedral. But for the most part the 
poems relating to this tour have an artificial look ; the 
sentiments in the vale of Chamouni seem to have been 
laboriously summoned for the occasion ; and the poet's 
admiration for the Italian maid and the Helvetian girl is 
a mere shadow of the old feeling for the Highland girl, to 
whom, in fact, he seems obliged to recur in order to give 
reality to his new emotion. 

To conclude the subject of Wordsworth's travels, I will 
mention here that in 1823 he made a tour in Holland, and 
in 1824 in North Wales, where his sonnet to the torrent 
at the Devil's Bridge recalls the Swiss scenery seen in his 
youth with vigour and dignity. In 1828 he made another 
excursion in Belgium with Coleridge, and in 1829 he visit- 
ed Ireland with his friend Mr. Marshall. Neither of these 
tours was productive. In 1831 he paid a visit with his 
daughter to Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford, before his de- 
parture to seek health in Italy. Scott received them cor- 
dially, and had strength to take them to the Yarrow. " Of 
that excursion," says Wordsworth, " the verses Yarroiv Re- 
visited are a memorial. On our return in the afternoon we 
had to cross the Tweed, directly opposite Abbotsford. A 
rich but sad light, of rather a purple than v. golden hue, 
was spread over the Eildon hills at that moment; and, 
thinking it. probable that it might be the last time Sir 
Walter would cross the stream (the Tweed), I was not a 
little moved, and expressed some of my feelings in the 
sonnet beginning, A trouble not of clouds nor iveeping rain. 
At noon on Thursday we left Abbotsford, and on the morn- 



XI.] ITALIAN TOUR. 155 

ing of that day Sir Walter and I had a serious conversation, 
tete-a-tete, when he spoke with gratitude of the happy life 
which, npon the whole, he had led. He had written in my 
dano-hter's album, before he came into the breakfast-room 
that morning, a few stanzas addressed to her ; and, while 
putting the book into her hand, in his own study, stand- 
ing by his desk, he said to her, in my presence, ' I should 
T\oi have done anything of this kind but for your father's 
sake ; they are probably the last verses I shall ever write.' 
They show how much his mind was impaired ; not by the 
strain of thought, but by the execution, some of the lines 
being imperfect, and one stanza wanting corresponding 
rhymes. One letter, the initial S, had been omitted in 
the spelling of his own name." 

There was another tour in Scotland in 1833, which pro- 
duced Memorials of little poetic value. And in 1837 he 
made a long tour in Italy with Mr. Crabbe Robinson. But 
the poems which record this tour indicate a mind scarcely 
any longer susceptible to any vivid stimulus except from 
accustomed objects and ideas. The Miisinffs near Aqua- 
pendente are musings on Scott and Helvellyn ; the Fine 
Tree of Monte Mario is interesting because Sir George 
Beaumont has saved it from destruction ; the Cuckoo at 
Laverna brings all childhood back into his heart. " I re- 
member perfectly well," says Crabbe Robinson, " that I 
heard the cuckoo at Laverna twice before he heard it ; and 
that it absolutely fretted him that my ear was first favour- 
ed ; and that he exclaimed with delight, ' I hear it ! I hear 
it r " This was his last foreign tour ; nor, indeed, are 
these tours very noticeable except as showing that he was 
not blindly wedded to his own lake scenery ; that his ad- 
miration could face comparisons, and keep the same vivid- 
ness when he was fresh from other orders of beauty. 



156 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

The productions of these later years took for the most 
part a didactic rather than a descriptive form. In the 
volume entitled Poems cliieflij of Early and Later Years, 
published in 1842, were many hortatory or ecclesiastical 
pieces of inferior merit, and among them various additions 
to the Ecclesiastical Sketches, a series of sonnets begun in 
1821, but which he continued to enlarge, spending on them 
much of the energies of his later years. And although it 
is only in a few instances — as in the description of King's 
College, Cambridge — that these sonnets possess force or 
charm enough to rank them high as poetry, yet they as- 
sume a certain value when we consider not so much their 
own adequacy as the greater inadequacy of all rival at- 
tempts in the same direction. 

The Episcopalian Churchman, in this country or in the 
United States, will certainly nowhere find presented to him 
in poetical form so dignified and comprehensive a record 
of the struggles and the glories, of the vicissitudes and the 
edification, of the great body to which he belongs. Next 
to the Anglican liturgy, though next at an immense in- 
terval, these sonnets may take rank as the authentic ex- 
position of her historic being — an exposition delivered 
with something of her own unadorned dignity, and in her 
moderate and tranquil tone. 

I would not, however, seem to claim too much. The 
religion which these later poems of Wordsworth's embody 
is rather the stately tradition of a great Church than the 
pangs and aspirations of a holy soul. There is little in 
them, whether for good or evil, of the stuff of which a 
Paul, a Francis, a Dominic are made. That fervent emo- 
tion — akin to the passion of love rather than to intellect- 
ual or moral conviction — finds voice through singers of a 
very different tone. It is fed by an inward anguish and 



XI.] ECCLESIASTICAL SONNETS. 157 

felicity wliicli, to those who have not felt them, seem as 
causeless as a lover's moods ; by wrestlings not with liesh 
and blood ; by nights of despairing self-abasement ; by ec- 
stasies of an incommunicable peace. How great the gulf 
between Wordsworth and George Herbert ! — Herbert " of- 
fering at heaven, growing and groaning thither " — and 
Wordsworth, for whom the gentle regret of the Unes — 

" Me this unchartered freedom tires, 
I feel the weight of chance desires " — 

forms his most characteristic expression of the self-judg- 
ment of the solitary soul. 

Wordsworth accomplished one reconciliation of great 
importance to mankind. He showed, as plainly in his way 
as Socrates had shown it long ago, with what readiness a 
profoundly original conception of the scheme of things will 
shape itself into the mould of an established and venerable 
faith. He united the religion of the philosopher with the 
religion of the churchman ; one rarer thing he could nol- 
do : he could not unite the religion of the philosopher 
with the religion of the saint. It is, indeed, evident that 
the most inspiring feeling which breathes through Words- 
worth's ecclesiastical pieces is not of a doctrinal, not even 
of a spiritual kind. The ecclesiastical as well as the polit- 
ical sentiments of his later years are prompted mainly by 
the admiring love with which he regarded the structure of 
English society — seen as that society was by him in its 
simplest and most poetic aspect. This concrete attach- 
ment to the scenes about him had always formed an im- 
' portant element in his character. Ideal politics, whether 
in Church or State, had never occupied his mind, which 
sought rather to find its informing principles embodied in 
the England of his own day. The sonnet On a Parsonage 



158 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

in Oxfordshire well illustrates the loving minuteness witli 
which he draws out the beauty and fitness of the estab- 
lished scheme of things — the power of English country 
life to satisfy so many moods of feeling. 

The country-seat of the English squire or nobleman has 
become — may we not say ? — one of the world's chosen types 
of a happy and a stately home. And Wordsworth, espe- 
cially in his poems which deal with Coleorton, has shown 
how deeply he felt the sway of such a home's hereditary 
majesty, its secure and tranquillizing charm. Yet there 
are moods when the heart which deeply feels the inequali- 
ty of human lots turns towards a humbler idea. There are 
moments when the broad park, the halls and towers, seem 
no longer the fitting frame of human greatness, but rather 
an isolating solitude, an unfeeling triumph over the poor. 

In such a mood of mind it will not always satisfy us to 
dwell, as Wordsworth has so often done, on the virtue and 
happiness that gather round a cottage hearth — which we 
must, after all, judge by a somewhat less exacting stand- 
ard. We tarn rather to the " refined rusticity " of an Eng- 
lish Parsonage home — 

" Where holy ground beghis, unhallowed ends, 
Is marked by no distinguishable line ; 
The turf unites, the pathways intertwine " — 

and the clergyman's abode has but so much of dignity as 
befits the minister of the Church which is the hamlet's 
centre; enough to suggest the old Athenian boast of 
beauty without extravagance, and study without effemi- 
nacy ; enough to show that dwellings where not this life 
but another is the prevailing thought and care, yet need 
not lack the graces of culture nor the loves of home. 
The sonnet on Seathwaite Chapel, and the life of Robert 



XI.] POLITICAL VIEWS. " 15» 

Walker, the incumbent of Seatliwaite, Avliieli is given at 
Icno-tli in the notes to the sonnets on the Duddon, afford 
a still more characteristic instance of the clerical ideal 
towards which Wordsworth naturally turned. In Robert 
Walker he had a Cumbrian statesman turned into a prac- 
tical saint ; and he describes him with a gusto in which 
his laboured sonnets on Land or on Dissensions are wholly 
deficient. 

It was in social and political matters that the conse- 
quences of this idealizing view of the facts around him in 
Cumberland were most apparent. Take education, for 
example. Wordsworth, as has been already stated, was 
one of the earliest and most impressive assertors of the 
national duty of teaching every English child to read. 
He insists on this with a prosaic earnestness which places 
several pages of the Excursion among what may be called 
the standing bugbears which his poems offer to the inex- 
perienced reader. And yet as soon as, through the exer- 
tions of Bell and Lancaster, there seems to be some chance 
of really educating the poor. Dr. Bell, whom Coleridge 
fondly imagines as surrounded in heaven by multitudes of 
grateful angels, is to Wordsworth a name of horror. The 
mistresses trained on his system are called "Dr. Bell's 
sour-looking teachers in petticoats." And the instruction 
received in these new-fangled schools is compared to " the 
training that fits a boxer for victory in the ring." The 
reason of this apparent inconsistency is not far to seek. 
Wordsworth's eyes were fixed on the village life around 
him. Observation of that life impressed on him the im- 
perative necessity of instruction in reading. But it was 
from a moral rather than an intellectual point of view that 
he regarded it as needful, and, this opening into the world 
of ideas once secured, he held that the cultivation of the 



160 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

home affections and home duties was all that was needed 
beyond. And thus the Westmoreland dame, " in her sum- 
mer seat in the garden, and in winter by the fireside," was 
elevated into the unexpected position of the ideal instruc- 
tress of youth. 

Conservatism of this kind could provoke nothing but a 
sympathetic smile. The case was different when the same 
conservative — even retrograde — tendency showed itself on 
subjects on which party-feeling ran high. A great part 
of the meditative energy of Wordsworth's later years was 
absorbed by questions towards whose solution he contrib- 
uted no new element, and which filled him with dispro- 
portionate fears. And some injustice has been done to 
his memory by those who have not fully realized the pre- 
disposing causes which were at work — the timidity of age, 
and the deep-rooted attachment to the England which he 
knew. 

I speak of age, perhaps, somewhat prematurely, as the 
poet's gradually growing conservatism culminated in his 
opposition to the Catholic Relief Bill before he was sixty 
years old. But there is nothing to wonder at in the fact 
that the mind of a man of brooding and solitary habits 
should show traces of advancing age earlier than is the 
case with statesmen or men of the world, who are obliged 
to keep themselves constantly alive to the ideas of the gen- 
eration that is rising around them. A deadness to new 
impressions, an unv,'illingness to make intellectual efforts 
in fresh directions, a tendency to travel the same mental 
pathways over and over again, and to wear the ruts of 
prejudice deeper at every step ; such traces of age as these 
undoubtedly manifested themselves in the way in which 
the poet conTronted the great series of changes — Catho- 
lic Emancipation, Reform Bill, New Poor Law — on which 



XL] POLITICAL VIEWS. 161 

England entered about the year 1829. "My sixty-second 
year," Wordsworth writes, in 1832, "Avill soon be com- 
pleted; and thoiioh I have been favoured thus far in 
health and strength beyond most men of my age, yet I 
feel its effects upon my spirits ; they sink under a pres- 
sure of apprehension to which, at an earlier period of my 
life, they would probably have been superior.'' To this 
it must be added that the increasing weakness of the 
poet's eyes seriously limited his means of information. 
He had never read much contemporary literature, and he 
read less than ever now. He had no fresh or comprehen- 
sive knowledge of the general condition of the country, 
and he really believed in the prognostication which was 
uttered by many also who did not believe in it, that with 
the Reform Bill the England which he knew and loved 
would practically disappear. But there was nothing in 
him of the angry polemic, nothing of the calumnious par- 
tisan. One of the houses where Mr. Wordsworth was 
most intimate and most welcome was that of a reforming 
member of Parliament, who -was also a manufacturer, thus 
belonging to the two classes for which the poet had the 
greatest abhorrence. But the intimacy w^as never for a mo- 
ment shaken, and, indeed, in that house Mr. Wordsworth 
expounded the ruinous tendency of Reform and manufact- 
ures with even unusual copiousness, on account of the ad- 
miring affection with which he felt himself surrounded. 
The tone in which he spoke was never such as could give 
pain or excite antagonism ; and — if I may be pardoned for 
descending to a detail which well illustrates my position — 
the only rejoinder which these diatribes provoked was that 
the poet on his arrival was sometimes decoyed into utter- 
ing them to the younger members of the family, whose 
time was of less value, so as to set his mind free to return 



162 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

to tliose topics of more permanent interest where liis con- 
versation kept to the last all that tenderness, nobility, wis- 
dom, which in that family, as in many others familiar with 
the celebrated persons of that day, won for him a regard 
and a reverence such as was accorded to no other man. 

To those, indeed, who realized how deeply he felt these 
changes — how profoundly his notion of national happiness 
was bound up with a lovely and vanishing ideal — the 
prominent reflection was that the hopes and principles 
which maintained through all an underlying hope and 
trust in the future must have been potent indeed. It was 
no easy optimism which prompted the lines written in 
1837 — one of his latest utterances — in which he speaks to 
himself with strong self-judgment and resolute hope. On 
reading them one shrinks from dwelling longer upon an 
old man's weakness and a brave man's fears. 

" If this great world of joy and pain 
Revolve in one sure track ; 
If Freedom, set, revive again, 
And Virtue, flown, come back — 

" Woe to the purblind crew who fill 
The heart with each day's care. 
Nor learn, from past and future, skill 
To bear and to forbear." 

The poet had also during these years more of private 
sorrow than his tranquil life had for a long time expe- 
rienced. In 1832 his sister had a most serious illness, 
which kept her for many months in a state of great pros- 
tration, and left her, when the physical symptoms abated, 
with her intellect painfully impaired, and her bright nature 
permanently overclouded. Coleridge, too, Avas nearing his 
end. "He and my beloved sister," writes Wordsworth, 
in 1832, " are the two beings to whom my intellect is most 



XI.J LAUREATESHIR 163 

indebted, and they are now proceeding, as it were, 2M)-i 
passu, along tlie path of sickness, I will not say towards 
the grave, but I trust towards a blessed immortality." 

In July, 1834, " ev-ery mortal power of Coleridge was 
frozen at its marvellous source." And although the early 
intimacy had scarcely been maintained — though the 
" comfortless and hidden well " had, for a time at least, 
replaced the "living murmuring fount of love" which 
used to spring beside Wordsworth's door — yet the loss 
was one which the surviving poet deeply felt. Coleridge 
was the only contemporary man of letters with whom 
Wordsworth's connexion had been really close; and when 
Wordsworth is spoken of as one of a group of poets ex- 
emplifying in various ways the influence of the Revolu- 
tion, it is not always remembered how very little he had 
to do with the other famous men of his time. Scott and 
Southcy were valued friends, but he thought little of 
Scott's poetry, and less of Southey's. Byron and Shelley 
he seems scarcely to have read; and there is nothing to 
show that he had ever heard of Keats. But to Coleridge 
his mind constantly reverted ; he called him " the most 
wonderful man he had ever known," and he kept him as 
the ideal auditor of his own poems, long after Coleridge 
had listened to the Prelude — 

" A song divine of high and passionate thoughts 
To their own music chanted." 

In 1836, moreover, died one for whom Coleridge, as 
well as AVordsworth, had felt a very high respect and re- 
gard — Sarah Hutchinson, Mrs. Wordsworth's sister, and 
long the inmate of Wordsworth's household. This most 
valued friend had been another instance of the singular 
good fortune which attended Wordsworth in his domestic 



164 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

connexions; and when she was hiid in Grasraere church- 
yard, the stone above her tomb expressed the wish of the 
poet and his wife that, even as her remains Avere laid be- 
side their dead children's, so their own bodies also might 
be laid by hers. 

And now, while the inner circle of friends and relations 
began to pass away, the outer circle of admirers was rap- 
idly spreading. Between the years 1830 and 1840 Words- 
worth passed from the apostle of a clique into the most 
illustrious man of letters in England. The rapidity of 
this change was not due to any remarkable accident, nor 
to the appearance of any new work of genius. It was 
merely an extreme instance of what must always occur 
where an author, running counter to the fashion of his 
age, has to create his own public in defiance of the es- 
tablished critical powers. The disci^^les whom he draws 
round him are for the most part young ; the established 
authorities are for the most part old ; so that by the time 
that the original poet is about sixty years old, most of his 
admirers will be about forty, and most of his critics will 
be dead. His admirers now become his accredited critics ; 
his works are widely introduced to the public ; and if they 
arc really good his reputation is secure. In Wordsworth's 
case the detractors had been unusually persistent, and the 
reaction, when it came, was therefore unusually violent ; 
it was even somewhat factitious in its extent; and the 
poems were forced by enthusiasts upon a public which 
was only half ripe for them. After the poet's death a 
temporary counter-reaction succeeded, and his fame is only 
now finding its permanent level. 

Among the indications of growing popularity was the 
publication of an American edition of Wordsworth's 
poems in 1837, by Professor Reed, of Philadelphia, with 



XI.] LAUREATESHIP. 1G5 

^vllom the poet interchanged many letters of interest. 
" The acknowledgments," he says, in one of these, " which 
I receive from the vast continent of America are among 
the most grateful that reach me. AVhat a vast field is 
there open to the English mind, acting through our noble 
lano-uage ! Let us hope that our authors of true genius 
will not be unconscious of that thought, or inattentive to 
the duty which it imposes upon them, of doing their ut- 
most to instruct, to purify, and to elevate their readers." 

But of all the manifestations of the growing honour in 
which Wordsworth was held, none was more marked or 
welcome than the honorary degree of D.C.L. conferred on 
him by the University of Oxford in the summer of 1839. 
Keble, as Professor of Poetry, introduced him in words of 
admiring reverence, and the enthusiasm of the audience 
was such as had never been evoked in that place before, 
"except upon the occasions of the visits of the Duke 
of Wellington." The collocation was an interesting one. 
The special claim advanced for W^^rdsworth by Keble in 
his Latin oration was " that he had shed a celestial light 
upon the affections, the occupations, the piety of the poor." 
And to many men besides the author of the Christian 
Year it seemed that this striking scene was, as it were, 
another visible triumph of the temper of mind which is of 
the essence of Christianity ; a recognition that one spirit 
more had become as a little child, and had entered into 
the kingdom of heaven. 

In October, 1 842, another token of public respect was 
bestowed on him in the shape of an annuity of 300^. a 
year from the Civil List for distinguished literary merit. 
" I need scarcely add," says Sir Robert Peel, in making 
the offer, " that the acceptance by you of this mark of 
favour from the Crown, considering the grounds on which 



166 WORDSWORTH. [chap. xi. 

it is proposed, will impose no restraint upon your perfect 
independence, and involve no obligation of a personal 
nature." In March, 1843, came the death of Southey, and 
in a few days Wordsworth received a letter from Earl De 
la Warr, the Lord Chamberlain, offering him, in the most 
courteous terms, the office of Poet Laureate, which, how- 
ever, he respectfully declined as imposing duties " which, 
far advanced in life as I am, I cannot venture to undertake." 

This letter brought a reply from the Lord Chamberlain, 
pressing the office on him again, and a letter from Sir 
Robert Peel which gave dignified expression to the na- 
tional feeling in the matter. " The offer," he says, " was 
made to you by the Lord Chamberlain, with my entire 
concurrence, not for the purpose of imposing on you any 
onerous or disagreeable duties, but in order to pay you 
that tribute of respect which is justly due to the first of 
living poets. The Queen entirely aj^proved of the nomi- 
nation, and there is one unanimous feeling on the part 
of all who have heard of the proposal (and it is pretty 
generally known) that there could not be a question about 
the selection. Do not be deterred by the fear of any ob- 
ligations which the appointment may be supposed to 
imply. I will undertake that you shall have nothing 
required from you. But as the Queen can select for this 
honourable appointment no one whose claims for respect 
and honour, on account of eminence as a poet, can be 
placed in competition with yours, I trust you will not 
longer hesitate to accept it." 

This letter overcame the aged poet's scruples; and he 
filled with silent dignity the post of Laureate till, after 
seven years' space, a worthy successor received 

" This laurel greener from the brows 
Of hhu that uttered nothiii"- base." 



CHAPTER XIL 

LETTERS ON THE KENDAL AND WINDERMERE RAILWAY. 

CONCLUSION. 

\Yordsworth's appointment to the Laureateship was sig- 
nificant in more ways than one. He was so much be- 
sides a poet, that his appointment implied something of 
a national recognition, not only of his past poetical 
achievements, but of the substantial truth of that body 
of principles which through many years of neglect and 
ridicule he had consistently supported. There was, there- 
fore, nothing incongruous in the fact that the only com- 
position of any importance which Wordsworth produced 
after he became Laureate was in prose — his two letters 
on the projected Kendal and Windermere railway, 1844. 
No topic, in fact, could have arisen on which the veteran 
poet could more fitly speak with whatever authority his 
ofiicial spokesmanship of the nation's higher life could 
give, for it was a topic with every aspect of which he 
was familiar ; and so far as the extension of railways 
through the Lake country was defended on grounds of 
popular benefit (and not merely of commercial advan- 
tage) no one, certainly, had shown himself more capable 
of estimating at their full value such benefits as were here 
proposed. 

The results which follow on a large incursion of visitors 



168 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

into tlie Lake country may be considered under two heads, 
as affecting tlie residents, or as affecting- the visitors them- 
selves. And first as to the residents. Of the wealthier 
class of these I say nothing, as it will perhaps he thought 
that their inconvenience is outweighed by the possible 
profits which the railway may bring to speculators or con- 
tractors. But the effect produced on the poorer resi- 
dents — on the peasantry — is a serious matter, and the 
danger which was distantly foreseen by Wordsworth has 
since his day assumed grave proportions. And lest the 
poet's estimate of the simple virtue which is thus jeop- 
ardized should be suspected of partiality, it may be al- 
low^able to corroborate it by the testimony of an eminent 
man not a native of the district, though a settler therein 
in later life, and whose writings, perhaps, have done more 
than any man's since Wordsworth to increase the sum of 
human enjoyment derived both from Art and from Nature. 
" The Border peasantry of Scotland and England," says 
Mr. Ruskin,' " painted with absolute fidelity by Scott and 
Wordsworth (for leading types out of this exhaustless 
portraiture, I may name Dandie Dinmont, and Michael), 
are hitherto a scarcely injured race ; whose strength and 
virtue yet survive to represent the body and soul of Eng- 
land, before her days of mechanical decrepitude and com- 
mercial dishonour. There are men working in my own 
fields who might have fought with Ilenry the Fifth at 
Agincourt, without being discerned from among his 
knights ; I can take my tradesmen's word for a thousand 
pounds ; my garden gate opens on the latch to the public 
road, by day and night, without fear of any foot entering 
but my own ; and my girl-guests may wander by road or 

' A Protest against the Extension of Railways in the Lake District, 
— Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., 1876. 



XII.] LETTERS ON THE PROJECTED RAILWAY. 169 

moovLind, or tlirougli every bosky dell of this wild wood, 
free as the lieatlier-bees or squirrels. AVhat effect on the 
character of such a population will be produced by the 
influx of that of the suburbs of our manufacturing towns 
there is evidence enough, if the reader cares to ascertain 
the facts, in every newspaper on his morning table." 

There remains the question of how the greatest benefit 
is to be secured to visitors to the country, quite apart from 
the welfare of its more permanent inhabitants. At first 
sight this question seems to present a problem of a well- 
known order — to find the point of maximum pleasure to 
mankind in a case where the intensity of the pleasure va- 
ries inversely as its extension — where each fresh person 
who shares it diminishes jiro tanto the pleasure of the 
rest. But, as Wordsworth has pointed out, this is not in 
reality the question here. To the great mass of cheap ex- 
cursionists the characteristic scenery of the Lakes is in it- 
self hardly a pleasure at all. The pleasure, indeed, which 
they derive from contact with Nature is great and impor- 
tant, but it is one which could be offered to them, not only 
as well but much better, near their own homes. 

" It is benignly ordained that green fields, clear blue skies, running 
streams of pure water, rich groves and woods, orchards, and all the 
ordinary varieties of rural nature should find an easy way to the affec- 
tions of all men. But a taste beyond this, however desirable it may 
be that every one should possess it, is not to be implanted at once ; 
it must be gradually developed both in nations and individuals. 
Rocks and mountains, torrents and wide-spread waters, and all those 
features of nature Avhich go to tlie composition of such scenes as this 
part of England is distinguished for, cannot . in their finer relations to 
the human mind, be comprehended, or even very imperfectly conceived, 
without processes of culture or opportunities of observation in some 
degree habitual. In the eye of thousands and tens of thousands, a 
rich meadow, with fat cattle grazing upon it, or the sight of what they 



110 WORDSWOKTH. [chap. 

would call a heavy crop of corn, is worth all that the Alps and Pyre- 
nees in their utmost grandeur and beauty could show to them ; and 
it is noticeable what trifling conventional prepossessions will, in com- 
mon minds, not only preclude pleasure from the sight of natural 
beauty, but will even turn it into an object of disgust. In the midst 
of a small pleasure-ground immediately below my house rises a de- 
tached rock, equally remarkable for the beauty of its form, the ancient 
oaks that grow out of it, and the flowers and shrubs which adorn it. 
' What a nice place would this be,' said a Manchester tradesman, 
pointing to the rock, ' if that ugly lump were but out of the way.' Men 
as little advanced in the pleasure which such objects give to others 
are so far from being rare that they may be said fairly to represent 
a large majority of mankind. This is the fact, and none but the 
deceiver and the willingly deceived can be offended by its being 
stated." 



And, since this is so, the true means of raising the taste 
of the masses consists, as Wordsworth proceeds to point 
out, in giving them — not a few hurried glimpses of what 
is above their comprehension, but permanent opportunities 
of learning at leisure the first great lessons which Nature 
has to teach. Since he wrote thus our towns have spread 
their blackness wider still, and the provision of parks for 
the recreation of our urban population has become a press- 
ing national need. And here, again, the very w^ord recrea- 
tion suggests another unfitness in the Lake country for 
these purposes. Solitude is as characteristic of that region 
as beauty, and what the mass of mankind need for their 
refreshment — most naturally and justly — is not solitude 
but society. 

"The silence that is in the starry sky. 
The sleep that is among the lonely hills," 

is to them merely a drawback, to be overcome by moving 
about in large masses, and by congregating in chosen re- 



XII.] LETTERS ON THE PROJECTED RAILWAY. 171 

sorts with vehement hilarity. It would be most unreason- 
able to wish to curtail the social expansion of men whose 
lives are for the most part passed in a monotonous round 
of toil. But is it kinder and wiser — from any point of 
view but the railway shareholder's — to allure them into 
excursion trains by the prestige of a scenery which is to 
them (as it was to all classes a century or two ago) at best 
indifferent, or to provide them near at hand with their 
needed space for rest and play, not separated from their 
homes by hours of clamour and crowding, nor broken up 
by barren precipices, nor drenched with sweeping storm ? 

Unquestionably it is the masses whom we have first to 
consider. Sooner than that the great mass of the dwellers 
in towns should be debarred from the influences of Nature 
— sooner than that they should continue for another cen- 
tury to be debarred as now they are — it might be better 
that Cumbrian statesmen and shepherds should be turned 
into innkeepers and touts, and that every poet, artist, 
dreamer in England should be driven to seek his solitude 
at the North Pole. But it is the mere futility of sentiment 
to pretend that there need be any real collision of interests 
liere. There is space enough in England yet for all to en- 
joy in their several manners, if those who have the power 
would leave some unpolluted rivers, and some unblighted 
fields, for the health and happiness of the factory -hand, 
whose toil is for their fortunes, and whose degradation is 
their shame. 

Wordsworth, while indicating, with some such reason- 
ing as this, the true method of promoting the education 
of the mass of men in natural joys, was assuredly not like- 
ly to forget that in every class, even the poorest, are found 
exceptional spirits which some inbred power has attuned 
already to the stillness and glory of the hills. In what 



m WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

way the interests of such men may best be consulted, he 
has discussed in the following passage : 

" ' Nature, a' thy shows an' forms 

To feelhig pensive hearts hae charms !' 

So exclaimed the Ayrshire ploughman, speaking of ordi- 
nary rural nature under the varying influences of the sea- 
sons ; and the sentiment has found an echo in the bosoms 
of thousands in as humble a condition as he himself was 
when he gave vent to it. Bat then they were feeling, pen- 
sive hearts — men who would be among the first to lament 
the facility with which they had approached this region, by 
a sacrifice of so much of its quiet and beauty as, from the 
intrusion of a railway, would be inseparable. What can, 
in truth, be more absurd than that cither rich or poor 
should be spared the trouble of travelling by the high 
roads over so short a space, according to their respective 
means, if the unavoidable consequence must be a great dis- 
turbance of the retirement, and, in many places, a destruc- 
tion of the beauty, of the country which the parties are 
come in search of ? Would not this be pretty much like 
the child's cutting up his drum to learn where the sound 
came from ?" 

The truth of these words has become more conspicuous 
since Wordsworth's day. The Lake country is now both 
engirdled and intersected with railways. The point to 
which even the poorest of genuine lovers of the mountains 
could desire that his facilities of cheap locomotion should 
be carried has been not only reached but far overpassed. 
If he is not content to dismount from his railway car- 
riage at Coniston, or Seascale, or Bowness — at Penrith, or 
Troutbeck, or Keswdck — and to move at eight miles an 
hour in a coach, or at four miles an hour on foot, while he 



XII.] LETTERS ON THE PROJECTED RAILWAY. 173 

studies til at small intervening tract of country, of which 
every mile is a separate gem — when, we may ask, is he to 
dismount? what is he to study? Or is nothing to be ex- 
pected from nature but a series of dissolving views? 

It is impossible to feel sanguine as to the future of this 
irreplaceable national possession. A real delight in sce- 
nery — apart from the excitements of sport or mountain- 
eering, for which Scotland and Switzerland are better suit- 
ed than Cumberland — is still too rare a thing among the 
wealthier as among the poorer classes to be able to com- 
pete with such a power as the Railway Interest. And it is 
little likely now that the Government of England should 
act with regard to this district as the Government of the 
United States has acted with regard to the Yosemite and 
Yellowstone valleys, and guard as a national possession 
the beauty which will become rarer and more precious 
with every generation of men. But it is in any case de- 
sirable that Wordsworth's unanswered train of reasoning 
on the subject should be kept in view — that it should 
be clearly understood that the one argument for making 
more railways through the Lakes is that they may possi- 
bly pay ; while it is certain that each railway extension 
is injurious to the peasantry of the district, and to all 
visitors who really care for its scenery, while conferring 
no benefit on the crowds who are dragged many miles to 
what they do not enjoy, instead of having what they re- 
ally want secured to them, as it ought to be, at their own 
doors. 

It is probable that all this will continue to be said in 
vain. Railways, and mines, and waterworks Avill have 
their way, till injury has become destruction. The natu- 
ral sanctuary of England, the nurse of simple and noble 
natures, " the last region which Astra^a touches with fly- 



114: WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

ing feet," will be sacrificed — it is scarcely possible to 
doubt it — to the greed of gain. AVe must seek our con- 
solation in the thought that no outrage on nature is mor- 
tal ; that the ever-springing affections of men create for 
themselves continually some fresh abode, and inspire some 
new landscape with a consecrating history, and, as it were, 
with a silent soul. Yet it will be long ere round some 
other lakes, upon some other hill, shall cluster memories 
as pure and high as those which hover still around Rydal 
and Grasmere, and on Helvellyn's windy summit, " and by 
Glenriddino; Screes and low Glencoio'n." 

With this last word of protest and warning — uttered, 
as it may seem to the reader, with unexpected force and 
conviction from out of the tranquillity of a serene old 
age — Wordsworth's mission is concluded. The prophecy 
of his boyhood is fulfilled, and the " dear native regions " 
whence his dawning genius rose have been gilded by the 
last ray of its declining fire. There remains but the do- 
mestic chronicle of a few more years of mingled sadness 
and peace. And I will first cite a characteristic passage 
from a letter to his American correspondent, Mr. Reed, 
describing his presentation as Laureate to the Queen : 

" The reception given me by the Queen at her ball was 
most gracious. Mrs. Everett, the wife of your Minister, 
among many others, was a witness to it, without knowing 
who I w^as. It moved her to the shedding of tears. This 
effect was in part produced, I suppose, by American habits 
of feeling, as pertaining to a republican government. To 
see a gray-haired man of seventy-five years of age kneel- 
ing down in a large assembly to kiss the hand of a young 
woman is a sight for which institutions essentially demo- 
cratic do not prepare a spectator of either sex, and must 
naturally place the opinions upon which a republic is 



XII.] COXCLUSIOX. 175 

founded, and the sentiments which support it, in strong 
contrast with a government based and upheld as ours is." 

In the same letter the poet introduces an ominous al- 
lusion to the state of his daughters health. Dora, his 
only daughter who survived childhood, was the darling of . 
Wordsworth's age. In her wayward gaiety and bright 
intehigence there was much to remind him of his sister's 
youth ; and his clinging nature wound itself round this 
new Dora as tenderly as it had ever done round her who 
was now only the object of loving compassion and care. 
In 1841 Dora Wordsworth married Mr. Quillinan, an ex- 
ofRcer of the Guards, and a man of great literary taste 
and some original power. In 1821 he had settled for a 
time in the vale of Rydal, mainly for the sake of Words- 
worth's society ; and ever since then he had been an in- 
timate and valued friend. He had been married before, 
but his wife died in 1822, leaving him two daughters, one 
of whom was named from the murmuring Rotha, and was 
god-child of the poet. Shortly after marriage, Dora Quil- 
linan's health began to fail. In 1845 the Quillinans went 
to Oporto in search of health, and returned in 1846, in the 
trust that it was regained. But in July, 1847, Dora Quil- 
linan died at Rydal, and left her father to mourn for his 
few remaining years his " immeasurable loss." 

The depth and duration of Wordsworth's grief, in such 
bereavements as fell to his lot, was such as to make his 
friends thankful that his life had, on the whole, been 
guided through ways of so profound a peace. 

Greatly, indeed, have they erred who have imagined 
him as cold, or even as by nature tranquil. "What 
strange workings," writes one from Rydal Mount, when 
the poet was in his sixty -ninth year — "what strange 
workings are there in his great mind ! How fearfully 



176 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

strong arc all his feelings and affections ! If his intellect 
had been less powerful they must have destroyed him 
long ago." Such, in fact, was the impression which he 
gave to those who knew him best throughout life. The 
look of premature age, Avliich De Quincey insists on ; the 
furrowed and rugged countenance, the brooding intensity 
of the eye, the bursts of anger at the report of evil do- 
ings, the lonely and violent roamings over the mountains 
— all told of a strong absorption and a smothered fire. 
His own description of himself, in his Imitation of the 
Castle of Indolence^ unexpected as it is by the ordinary 
reader, carries for those who knew him the stamp of truth : 

" Full many a time, upon a stormy night, 
His voice came to us from the neighbouring height : 

Oft did we see him driving full in view 
At mid-day when the sun was shining bright ; 
What ill was on him, what he had to do, 
A mighty wonder bred among our quiet crew. 

Ah ! piteous sight it was to see this Man 

When he came back to us, a withered flower — 

Or like a sinful creature, pale and wan. 

Down would he sit ; and without strength or power 
Look at the common grass from hour to hour : 

And oftentimes, how long I fear to say. 

Where apple-trees in blossom made a bower, 

Retired in that sunshiny shade he lay ; 

And, Uke a naked Indian, slept himself away. 

Great wonder to our gentle tribe it was 

Whenever from our valley he withdrew ; 
For happier soul no living creature has 

Than he had, being here the long day through. 

Some thought he was a lover, and did woo : 
Some thought far worse of him, and judged him wrong : 

But Verse was what he had been wedded to ; 



XII.] CONCLUSION. 177 

And his own mind did like a tempest strong 

Come to him thus, and drove the weary wight along." 

An excitement wliicli vents itself in bodily exercise car- 
ries its own sedative ^vitll it. And in comparing Words- 
worth's nature with that of otlier poets whose career has 
been less placid, we may say that he was perhaps not less 
excitable than they, but that it was his constant endeavour 
to avoid all excitement save of the purely poetic kind; 
and that the outward circumstances of his life — his me- 
diocrity of fortune, happy and early marriage, and absence 
of striking personal charm — made it easy for him to ad- 
here to a method of life which was, in the truest sense of 
the term, stoic — stoic alike in its practical abstinences and 
in its calm and grave ideal. Purely poetic excitement, 
however, is hard to maintain at a high point ; and the de- 
scription quoted above of the voice which came through 
the stormy night should be followed by another — by the 
same candid and self-picturing hand — which represents the 
same habits in a quieter light. 

"Nine -tenths of my verses," says the poet, in 1843, 
"have been murmured out in the open air. One day a 
stranger, having walked round the garden and grounds of 
Rydal Mount, asked of one of the female servants, who 
happened to be at the door, permission to see her master's 
study. ' This,' said she, leading him forward, ' is my mas- 
ter's library, where he keeps his books, but his study is out- 
of-doors.' After a long absence from home, it has more 
than once happened that some one of my cottage neigh- 
bours (not of the double-coach-house cottages) has said, 
' Well, there he is ! we are glad to hear him booing about 
again.' " 

Wordsworth's health, steady and robust for the most 
part, indicated the same restrained excitability. While 



178 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

he was well able to resist fatigue, exposure to weather, &c., 
there were, in fact, three things which his peculiar consti- 
tution made it difficult for him to do, and unfortunately 
those three things were reading, writing, and the compo- 
sition of poetry. A frequently recurring inflammation of 
the eyes, caught originally from exposure to a cold wind 
when overheated by exercise, but always much aggravated 
by mental excitement, sometimes prevented his reading for 
months together. His symptoms when he attempted to 
hold the pen are thus described in a published letter to 
Sir George Beaumont (1803) : 

"I do not know from what cause it is, but during the 
last three years I have never had a pen in my hand for five 
minutes before my whole frame becomes a bundle of un- 
easiness; a perspiration starts out all over me, and my 
chest is oppressed in a manner which I cannot describe." 
While as to the labour of composition his sister says (Sep- 
tember, 1800) : "He writes with so much feeling and agi- 
tation that it brings on a sense of pain and internal weak- 
ness about his left side and stomach, which now often 
makes it impossible for him to write when he is, in mind 
and feelings, in such a state that he could do it without 
difficulty." 

But turning to the brighter side of things — to the joys 
rather than the pains of the sensitive body and spirit — we 
find in Wordsworth's later years much of happiness on 
which to dwell. The memories which his name recalls 
are for the most part of thoughtful kindnesses, of simple- 
hearted joy in feeling himself at last appreciated, of tender 
sympathy with the young. Sometimes it is a recollection 
of some London drawing-room, where youth and beauty 
surrounded the rugged old man with an eager admiration 
which fell on no unwilling heart. Sometimes it is a story 



XII.] CONCLUSION. 179 

of some assemblage of young and old, rich and poor, from 
all the neighbouring h®uses and cottages, at Bydal Mount, 
to keep the aged poet's birthday with a simple feast and 
rustic play. Sometimes it is a report of some fireside 
gathering at Lancrigg or Foxhovv, where the old man grew 
eloquent as he talked of Barns and Coleridge, of Homer 
and Virgil, of the true aim of poetry and the true happi- 
ness of man. Or we are told of some last excursion to 
well -loved scenes; of holly -trees planted by the poet's 
hands to stimulate nature's decoration on the craggy 
hill. 

Such are the memories of those who best remember him. 
To those who were young children while his last years 
went by he seemed a kind of mystical embodiment of the 
lakes and mountains round him — a presence without which 
they would not be what they were. And now he is gone, 
and their untouched and early charm is going too. 

" Heu, tua nobis 
Paene simul tecum solatia rapta, Menalca !" 

Rydal Mount, of which he had at one time feared to be 
deprived, was his to the end. He still paced the terrace- 
walks — but now the flat terrace oftener than the sloping 
one — whence the eye travels to lake and mountain across 
a tossing gulf of green. The doves that so long had been 
wont to answer with murmurs of their own to his " half- 
formed melodies " still hung in the trees above his path- 
way ; and many who saw him there must have thought of 
the lines in which his favourite poet congratulates himself 
that he has not been exiled from his home. 

" Calm as thy sacred streams thy years shall flow ; 
Groves which thy youth has known thine age shall know ; 



180 WORDSWORTH. [chap. 

Here, as of old, Hyblaean bees shall twine 
Their mazy murmur into dreams of thine — 
Still from the hedge's willow-bloom shall come 
Through summer silences a slumberous hum — 
Still from the crag shall lingering winds prolong 
The half-heard cadence of the woodman's song — 
While evermore the doves, thy love and care, 
Fill the tall elms with sighing in the air." 



Yet words like these fail to give the solemnity of liis 
last years — the sense of grave retrospection, of humble 
self-judgment, of hopeful looking to the end. " It is in- 
deed a deep satisfaction," he writes, near the close of life, 
"to hope and believe that my poetry will be, while it lasts, 
a help to the cause of virtue and truth, especially among 
the young. As for myself, it seems now of little moment 
how long I may be remembered. When a man pushes off 
in his little boat into the great seas of Infinity and Eter- 
nity, it surely signifies little how long he is kept in sight 
by watchers from the shore." 

And again, to an intimate friend, " Worldly-minded I am 
not ; on the contrary, my wish to benefit those within my 
humble sphere strengthens seemingly in exact proportion to 
my inability to realize those wishes. What I lament most 
is that the spirituality of my nature does not expand and 
rise the nearer I approach the grave, as yours does, and as 
it fares with my beloved partner." 

The aged poet might feel the loss of some vividness of 
emotion, but his thoughts dwelt more and more constant- 
ly on the unseen world. One of the images which recurs 
oftenest to his friends is that of the old man as he would 
stand against the window of the dining-room at Rydal 
Mount and read the Psalms and Lessons for the day ; of 
the tall bowed figure and the silvery hair; of the deep 



XII.] CONCLUSION. 181 

voice which always faltered when among the prayers he 
came to the words which give thanks for those " who have 
departed this life in Thy faith and fear." 

There is no need to prolong the narration. As healthy 
infancy is the same for all, so the old age of all good men 
brings philosopher and peasant once more together, to 
meet with the same thoughts the inevitable hour. What- 
ever the well-fought fight may have been, rest is the same 
for all. 

"Retiremeut then might hourly look 

Upon a soothing scene ; 
Age steal to his allotted nook 

Contented and serene ; 
With heart as calm as lakes that sleep, 

In frosty moonlight glistening, 
Or mountain torrents, where they creep 
Along a channel smooth and deep. 

To their own far-off murmurs listening." 

What touch has given to these lines their impress of an 
unfatliomable peace ? For there speaks from them a tran- 
quillity which seems to overcome our souls ; which makes 
us feel in the midst of toil and passion that we are dis- 
quieting ourselves in vain ; that we are travelling to a re- 
gion where these things shall not be ; that " so shall im- 
moderate fear leave us, and inordinate love shall die." 

Wordsworth's last days were absolutely tranquil. A 
cold caught on a Sunday afternoon walk brought on a 
pleurisy. He lay for some weeks in a state of passive 
weakness ; and at last Mrs. Wordsworth said to him, 
" William, you are going to Dora." " He made no reply 
at the time, and the words seem to have passed unheeded ; 
indeed, it was not certain that they had been even heard. 
More than twenty-four hours afterwards one of his nieces 



182 WORDSWORTH. [chap. xii. 

came into his room, and was drawing aside the curtain of 
his chamber, and then, as if awakening from a quiet sleep, 
he said, 'Is that Dora?'" 

On Tuesday, April 23, 1850, as his favourite cuckoo- 
clock struck the hour of noon, his spirit passed away. 
His body was buried, as he had wished, in Grasmere church- 
yard. Around him the dalesmen of Grasmere lie beneath 
the shade of sycamore and yew; and Rotha's murmur 
mourns the pausing of that " music sweeter than her own." 
And surely of him, if of any one, we may think as of a 
man who was so in accord with nature, so at one with the 
very soul of things, that there can be no Mansion of the 
Universe which shall not be to him a home, no Governor 
who will not accept him among his servants, and satisfy 
him with love and peace. 



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